From Bourassa to Bourassa : Wilderness to Restoration [2 ed.] 9780773570320, 9780773523913

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From Bourassa to Bourassa

By examining the central role played by Protestant and Catholic women in establishing the religious faith of their children and, by extension, the future of their respective communities, Labour, Love, and Prayer explores the construction of female stereotypes during a . period of mounting religious tension in Ireland. Andrea Ebel Broz yna compares ideas of faith and family in both cultures, highlighting the remarkable similarities in their views and each group’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge them. . Broz yna argues that Catholics and Protestants shared very similar views of Christian womanhood. Both lauded the influence of the virtuous Christian woman, used the same female role models from the Bible, and saw the home as the locus of the construction of female piety. Yet each group castigated the other for having antifemale values. Protestants developed the slovenly, drunken “Biddy” as a stereotype of Catholic women and Catholics portrayed Protestant devotional and family life as cold and arid. Observers of present-day Northern Ireland will find these historical contrasts of immediate relevance. An interesting new look at the Irish problem, Labour, Love, and Prayer makes a valuable contribution to the histories of women, Ireland, and religion. . andrea ebel broz yna is an independent scholar who lives and works in Toronto. She is currently writing a biography of the Nun of Kenmare.

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From Bourassa to Bourassa Wilderness to Restoration l . i an ma cdo n a l d

Second Edition

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© L. Ian MacDonald 2002 isbn 0-7735-2391-x (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2392-8 (paper) Legal deposit third quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. The first edition of From Bourassa to Bourassa, subtitled A Pivotal Decade in Canadian History, was published in 1984 by Harvest House Ltd.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data MacDonald, L. Ian From Bourassa to Bourassa : wilderness to restoration 2nd ed. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2391-x (bound).—isbn 0-7735-2392-8 (pbk.) 1. Bourassa, Robert, 1933–1996. 2. Quebec Liberal Party. 3. Quebec (Province)—Politics and government—1976–1985. 4. Quebec (Province)—Politics and government—1985–1994. 5. Canada—Politics and government—1963–1984. 6. Canada—Politics and government—1984–1993. I. Title. fc2925.2.m32 2002 f1053.2.m27 2002

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c2002-901561-8

Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by True to Type

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For Gracie and Natacha, who bring us joy

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Contents

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Contents

Preface to the Second Edition ix 1 “A Change May Be in the Order of Things” 3 2 The Liberal Establishment: Picking Up the Pieces 13 3 “This Damn Word Irrevocable” 27 4 Draft Ryan 33 5 Insider, Outsider 44 6 Scarves and Balloons 55 7 The Ryan Express 70 8 Observe, Judge, Act 82 9 Non merci! 92 10 Yvette 100 11 Le oui et le non 109 12 The Cousins 121 13 Ryan and Trudeau: Two Hardheads 141 14 The Heirs of Lord Acton 152 15 Elliott: The Favorite Son 161 16 The Big Village: May 20, 1980

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17 The Silent Spring 183 18 Ryan: The Final Days 195 19 Bourassa Redux 205 20 From Bourassa to Bourassa 215 21 Second Debut 233 22 Miracle at Meech Lake 245 23 Deal at Dawn 267 24 Such Good Friends 282 25 Annus Horribilis, 1990 301 Epilogue 328 List of Interviewees 345 Bibliography 347 Index 353

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Preface to the Second Edition

The first time I met Robert Bourassa was in late September 1976, when he invited me to lunch for a “deep backgrounder” on the election he was planning to call within weeks. We met in a private salon at Chez Son Père, a Park Avenue restaurant in Montreal where the premier often lunched on Mondays and Fridays. Bourassa ordered his habitual white fish and sipped a glass of Chablis, and for the next two hours, he laid out his scenario for the coming campaign. Earlier that month, British Prime Minister James Callaghan, visiting the Quebec government’s fishing lodge at Lac l’Épaule near Quebec City, had warned Bourassa that if Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau were to seek a unilateral patriation of the Canadian Constitution from Westminster, Her Majesty’s Government would have no choice but to comply. Bourassa thought that, with this political pretext, he could legitimately call an early election, only three years into his second term, to seek a mandate to thwart Trudeau’s apparent unilateralism on the Constitution. There was also the afterglow of the Olympic Games, concluded in early August in Montreal, where the Olympic facilities had been successfully rushed to virtual completion only after Bourassa’s government took over the project from the local organizing committee. But there was also a stench of scandal hanging over the government that fall, largely over union muscle in public works construction, from Bourassa’s own cherished hydroelectric “Project of the Century” at James Bay to the unfinished tower and roof of the billion-dollar Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Years later he would take great pleasure

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in pointing out that he had been fully exonerated in 1980 by Judge Albert Malouf’s one-man Olympic inquiry, which had been appointed by the Lévesque government. The Cliche Commission on violence and corruption in the construction industry had held months of sensational hearings in the winter of 1974–75. Chaired by provincial court judge Robert Cliche, with commissioners Brian Mulroney and Guy Chevrette and an obscure counsel named Lucien Bouchard, the inquiry had dominated Quebec headlines for a year before delivering a devastating report in May 1975, which concluded that the government was complicit in the chicanery in the construction trades. The Quebec media, inspired by Watergate, were looking for smoking guns all over the Bourassa government. There was, he conceded that late September day, a climate of moroseness. Bourassa was seen as a pragmatic, rather than principled, politician, driven more by calculation than conviction, more by opportunism than opportunity. He knew that integrity in government was going to be a major issue for the opposition Parti Québécois. But he was also counting on a separatist scare to bring disaffected voters home to the Liberals. “Of course,” he said with a chuckle, “it would help if the polls aren’t too good in the beginning.” Some two months later, he again sat in the small salon of Chez Son Père and contemplated his rejection and ruin in the campaign that saw the stunning election of the pq on November 15, 1976. The election launched Quebec on the road to the 1980 referendum on sovereignty-association. And it launched Quebec Liberals on the path to intellectual renewal under the leadership of Claude Ryan, the former director of Le Devoir, who had endorsed the pq in 1976. Ultimately, it would lead to Pierre Trudeau’s solemn referendum promise of constitutional reform, resulting in patriation of the Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. All those forces were set in motion by Bourassa’s defeat. At forty-three, he faced an uncertain political future, and probably no future at all. He had called an unnecessary election that put the separatists in power and cost him his own seat, and the Liberal leadership, which he resigned in short order. He was already planning an academic exile in Brussels, to study applications of the European Common Market (later the European Union) to the Canadian and North American context. But just because he had lost an election didn’t mean he had lost his political insights and instincts. He was a superb political animal, who weighed the risk and calculated the impact of every decision he took and every gesture he posed, sometimes to his own detriment. Bourassa understood after his defeat that if there was to be any hope of a

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comeback, he must first have the decency to disappear. No one would have ever suggested then, in December 1976, that he had any prospect of a political comeback. But even then, as he confided to Jean Masson, a Montreal lawyer who had worked on his campaign tour, “Even if my chances are only 1 percent, I will never give up.” Whenever there was a referendum or riding association meeting, Bourassa was available. Whenever there was a formidable debating opponent, a Jacques Parizeau or Pierre Bourgault, he was there. Whenever there was a Liberal fundraiser in a church basement, he was the guest speaker. That he would play a leading supporting role for the federalist forces in the coming referendum wasn’t on anyone’s mind but his own—even then, he saw it as a way back. That, in his own words, he would later “replace my successor” was simply unthinkable. That he would again become premier of Quebec and serve another two full terms of office was never suggested by any serious political commentator. Nevertheless, he thought so, from the beginning, and pursued his dream, from wilderness to restoration. In all, Robert Bourassa would serve four terms and nearly fifteen years in office, over three decades from 1970 to 1994, making him the longest serving premier and most durable political figure in Quebec since Maurice Duplessis. Thus the second edition of From Bourassa to Bourassa: Wilderness to Restoration. As in the first edition, Bourassa is not the center of the story but a leading actor in a composite narrative of a period in the modern history of Quebec and Canada. Along the way, political fate took many strange twists and turns during the Liberal wilderness years from 1976 to 1985 and later during the Bourassa restoration from 1985 to 1994. In the period covered in the first edition, from Bourassa’s defeat in 1976 to his regaining of the Liberal leadership in 1983, he forms the bookends to the story. Of his fatal miscalculation in calling the 1976 election, he might himself have used a favorite quote from Fouché, Napoleon’s minister of police: “Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” The election was the catalyst that launched Quebec and Canada into the referendum era, culminating with the plebiscite on sovereigntyassociation on May 20, 1980. This is that story, set within the framework of the Quebec Liberal party and its “cousins,” the federal Liberals. Though the Quebec Liberals had been a separate political entity since the time of Jean Lesage and had separate high commands, the two parties were composed essentially of the same troops on the ground. The major actors in that drama for the federalist forces were Claude Ryan, who had been chosen as Bourassa’s successor in 1978, and Pierre Trudeau, born again as prime minister in the federal election

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of February 1980, following his defeat and even his retirement announcement in 1979. Bourassa managed to write a supporting role for himself, appearing in pq strongholds such as universities and proclaiming Canada as “one of the most privileged countries of the world.” It was a much less ambiguous statement of attachment to Canada than the “profitable federalism” he had proposed during his time in office. The alliance of Ryan and Trudeau was an uneasy one from the beginning. They were long-time intellectual rivals, with conflicting visions of Quebec and its place in Canada. And indeed, the alliance effectively ended on the morning of referendum day, when Trudeau informed Ryan during a visit to his house that he would be moving quickly to take action on patriating the Constitution. Ryan was appalled and told Trudeau that he should at least wait until a federalist interlocutor was in place in Quebec. Trudeau’s patriation package in September 1980, which Ryan considered a political betrayal, gave René Lévesque the pretext to postpone an election that would normally have been called in the fall, after four years in office, putting it over to the spring of 1981 and well into the fifth and final year of his legal mandate. By then, the referendum tide had gone out, and the issue was satisfaction with the Lévesque government, which was high, and the leadership of the charismatic Lévesque versus the austere Ryan. If Bourassa’s defeat in 1976 had been the reason the Liberal party virtually drafted Ryan for the leadership, Ryan’s loss in 1981 paved the way for Bourassa’s reaccession as leader of the party and, eventually, premier of Quebec. The second edition of From Bourassa to Bourassa also covers the main events of the restoration period, beginning with the election of December 1985, which returned Bourassa to power. The pariah of 1976 was premier again nine years later, completing one of the most remarkable resurrections in the annals of Canadian politics. The Meech Lake Accord and Quebec’s support for the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement (fta) and later the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), including Mexico, were the most important public policy initiatives of the later Bourassa years. Under the fta and nafta, Quebec would see its merchandise exports to the United States triple to nearly $60 billion in just over a decade. On a stand-alone basis, it would be America’s sixth largest trading partner. The negotiation of Meech Lake in 1987 fostered hopes for constitutional reconciliation that were dashed with its death in 1990. The prospects for Meech’s passage were not enhanced by Bourassa’s use of the notwithstanding clause in Bill 178 late in 1988, overriding a

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Supreme Court decision declaring Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, Bill 101, unconstitutional. Though the notwithstanding clause had actually been agreed to by Prime Minister Trudeau as the price of obtaining the Charter of Rights in 1981, in the public’s mind it was all mixed up with Meech Lake. In English-speaking Canada, Bill 178 was an arrow through the heart of Meech. It meant that in the distinct society, English would be restricted in the language of signs. The demise of Meech set in motion a chain of volatile events, including Bourassa’s Bill 150 to hold a referendum within two years, the quasi-sovereignist Allaire Report in the Liberal party, the BélangerCampeau Commission, and finally, the second constitutional round leading to the Charlottetown Accord in 1992. From the summer of 1990, Bourassa was leading the apparent march to sovereignty, in order to slow it down. This was also the summer of the Oka Crisis, and the summer he was diagnosed with cancer—all in all, Bourassa’s annus horribilis. During the Meech period and the free trade debate that dominated the 1988 federal election, I had a privileged view of history in the making, while serving as an adviser to the Privy Council and chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. At the signing ceremony for the Meech accord after the marathon Langevin Block meeting of June 1987, I had a particularly privileged seat, behind and directly between Bourassa and Mulroney. “Robert,” I said, leaning forward to whisper in his ear. “We’re going to talk about honor and enthusiasm,” referring to Mulroney’s famous Sept-Îles speech in the 1984 campaign to seek Quebec’s signature on the Constitution. “C’est bon ça,” Bourassa replied. The thunderous standing ovation he received that day as he signed the Meech Lake Accord was unlike any other ever heard in the old Ottawa train station. It actually brought tears to his eyes. At one point, on the long night of the Langevin Block negotiation, I played a minor role in relaying a message from Mulroney to Bourassa, and therefore had no choice but to briefly inject myself into the narrative in the first person in chapter 23, “Deal at Dawn.” Later Bourassa would stay in touch, sometimes calling the Prime Minister’s Office and creating confusion among our communications staff about who was on the phone. “Le pm, le premier ministre, on line two,” a secretary once said, waving urgently as she stood at the door of my office. When I picked up, it was Bourassa, not Mulroney, and we shared a good laugh over that. We had many conversations over the last twenty years of Bourassa’s life, including several long interviews for the first edition of this book, at his home in Montreal, on the train from Quebec City, at his summer residence at Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel, and even at his winter home in Bal

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Harbour, Florida, where he liked to enjoy the sunrays that later afflicted him with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer that eventually took his life. At the end of the 1985 campaign, we had an extensive interview aboard his campaign plane from Val-d’Or to Montreal. After his return to office, we had one long conversation on a flight from Vancouver to Montreal, after his visit to Quebec Day at Expo ’86, and many more conversations around the margins of the Meech Lake Accord and the Free Trade Agreement. After Bourassa left office in January 1994, we had several further conversations in Washington and Montreal during the 1995 referendum campaign. The last time we spoke, in 1996, was just weeks before his final illness. I’ve drawn on many of those conversations, formal interviews, private chats, and hurried phone calls for Bourassa’s contribution to the second edition of this book. For the first edition, published in 1984, I conducted some one hundred personal interviews, a list of which can be found at the back of the book. For this second edition, I did many more lengthy interviews in the fall of 2001 and winter of 2002 with prominent figures and senior federal and Quebec officials from the Bourassa restoration period. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney was particularly generous with his time, granting two lengthy interviews and offering many more recollections over the phone. “It’s too bad,” he said, “that Robert never got around to writing his memoirs.” But in a way, he did, in Gouverner le Québec, a 1995 oral history from round-table conversations with professors while he held the Jean Monnet chair at his alma mater, the Université de Montréal. Though ultimately as self-serving as any autobiography, it is an indispensable calendar of the important events of the Bourassa years. There is also an unmistakable tone of summing up, as if he knew he might not have much time. Former Ontario premier David Peterson, who struck up an important personal and political friendship with Bourassa, was also generous with his time at his Toronto law office. His former principal secretary, Dan Gagnier, later a senior vice-president of Alcan in Montreal, was a close observer of the final Meech agony. Former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna, an important actor in the Meech drama, was equally forthcoming with his recollections in Toronto, where he has also built a thriving commercial law practice. Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard had refused all requests for interviews since leaving office in 2001. However he graciously agreed to a lengthy discussion at his Montreal law office in February 2002. Bouchard first knew Bourassa as an acquaintance in politics but, as he said, “we became friends more than anything else, especially after he left office.” Former

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Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells, who became chief justice of Newfoundland and Labrador, was unable as a judge to grant a personal interview. However, he courteously agreed to point out or provide “documents, materials and interviews made public at the time” of the Meech Lake drama of 1990. In Bourassa’s cabinet there was no more significant figure than Gil Rémillard, minister of Intergovernmental Affairs during the Meech years. He discussed the substantive elements of the Quebec constitutional strategy. “Ah, Meech,” he said, “it’s all in a box in my basement. I haven’t looked at it in ten years. I haven’t wanted to.” John Ciaccia, then minister of Native Affairs as well as of International Affairs, was extremely forthcoming about the Oka Crisis, of which he wrote in his memoir, Oka: A Mirror of the Soul. John Parisella, Bourassa’s chief of staff during his last five years in office, saw the premier every day in his Quebec and Montreal offices. During Bourassa’s illness and absence in 1990–91, Parisella was premier in all but name for six months. Ronald Poupart, the premier’s director of communications and press secretary from 1985-1989, and later a senior deputy minister in the Quebec public service, is an institutional memory on Bourassa, whom he knew for thirty years, from 1966 until his death in 1996. And no one knows the Quebec Liberal party better than Pierre Bibeau, its chief organizer in the new century, as he was in the last, in the 1980 referendum and in the 1981 and 1985 elections. In Ottawa, Senator Lowell Murray, Mulroney’s minister of FederalProvincial Relations during the Meech period, granted access to himself and his remarkable personal archive. The lone non–first minister at the table during the seven-day drama of the 1990 first ministers’ lockup, Murray kept detailed handwritten notes at the direction of the prime minister. He gave me a tantalizing glimpse of them. Conservative leader Joe Clark, minister of Constitutional Affairs during the negotiations that resulted in the Charlottetown Accord, shared his recollections of that process, particularly a critical conversation he had with Bourassa on July 7, 1992. In St. John’s, John Crosbie shared his vivid memories of the final days of the Meech drama in June 1990, when as the federal minister from Newfoundland and political boss for Atlantic Canada, he flew home to lead a frantic bipartisan lobbying campaign of Clyde Wells’s Liberal caucus in the provincial legislature. From Victoria, Norman Spector, secretary to the cabinet for Federal-Provincial Relations during the Meech years, added his own recollections of the three years he rode the constitutional roller coaster. He was one of only two senior officials in the room during the three crucial First Ministers’ Confer-

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ences—at Meech Lake on April 30, 1987, at the Langevin Block on June 2–3, 1987, and at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull and the National Conference Centre in Ottawa, June 3–9, 1990. In Toronto, Professor Charles McMillan of York University, formerly senior policy adviser to Prime Minister Mulroney, was most helpful on the origins of the free trade initiative and the strategy to bring the provinces on board through regular meetings of the first ministers, as well as the creation of the Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade, which created a broad business consensus for the free trade initiative. Jean Charest, the current leader of the Quebec Liberals, was something of a protégé of Bourassa. After Charest’s strong performance in the 1995 referendum campaign, Bourassa told him he might eventually have no choice but to leave the Conservative leadership in Ottawa and become leader of the Liberal party in Quebec. We were sitting in Charest’s Montreal office, discussing Bourassa, on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he turned on the television as Peter Jennings was describing the twin towers of the World Trade Center going up in flames. Many others were generous with their time and recollections of those important events, including Bernard Roy, Mulroney’s principal secretary during the first Meech round, and Hugh Segal, chief of staff during the negotiation of the Charlottetown Accord and now president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal. My thanks to them all. Special thanks to three valued colleagues and friends who read the new chapters of the second edition, adding their own insights and anecdotal details. Graham Fraser, columnist and national affairs writer for The Toronto Star, has covered all the constitutional wars since the 1960s. His own book, René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power, nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 1985 and published in a second edition by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2001, is indispensable to an understanding of the sovereignty movement and the Lévesque years. Bernard St. Laurent of cbc Radio brings a quarter-century of riding the press bus out of Quebec City and Montreal. During the 1980 referendum campaign, we were touring the main James Bay site, when a bunch of unruly Yes demonstrators from one of the unions surrounded the bus. Bernie went to the open door of the bus and took them on. “You guys have it all wrong,” he yelled. “If it weren’t for Bourassa, you wouldn’t have jobs.” He shouted the crowd into silence. That was Bernie St. Laurent—he was having fun, but he was also making a point. Anthony Wilson-Smith, now editor-in-chief of Maclean’s, was

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the magazine’s Quebec correspondent from 1983–1988 and had his own privileged access to Bourassa, which he has generously shared. The suggestion for a second edition of From Bourassa to Bourassa came in a conversation with Philip Cercone, executive director of McGill-Queen’s University Press. He thought it would be worth telling the rest of the story and introducing From Bourassa to Bourassa to a new generation of readers in Canada and, through the extensive distribution network of McGill-Queen’s, the United States, particularly in undergraduate courses in Canadian and Quebec studies, history, and political science. I spent the fall of 2001 and into the spring of 2002 researching, interviewing, and writing five new chapters and an epilogue on the main events of the Bourassa restoration period. All the quotes from the main actors are from interviews with the author, except where otherwise attributed or in the public domain. In some cases, I have drawn on memory from conversations with Bourassa and Mulroney. Other sources can be found in the selected bibliography. Of the many books on the Meech saga, the most important by far is Andrew Cohen’s A Deal Undone, an informed, meticulous, and highly readable narrative of the making and breaking of the Meech Lake Accord. For the role of Newfoundland Premier Clyde Wells and his suicide pact with Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon, killing the accord in both provinces before it ever came to a vote, see Deborah Coyne’s Roll of the Dice. For an understanding of the free trade issue that dominated the 1988 election, see Decision at Midnight, Michael Hart’s compelling and authoritative account of the Canada–United States free trade negotiations. For a benchmarking of the results for Quebec and Canada a decade later, see Free Trade: Risks and Rewards, also from McGill-Queen’s University Press, which I edited in 2000. Without Bourassa’s and Quebec’s support, there would have been no free trade deal. There are many other people to be thanked, beginning with Joan McGilvray, my eagle-eyed editor at McGill-Queen’s, who has an elegant way of reminding a writer of a looming deadline. “When may we expect the rest?” she asked in a dry e-mail late in 2001. As well, thanks to Elizabeth Hulse for her meticulous editing of the manuscript. At The Gazette in Montreal, my thanks to former publisher Michael Goldbloom and his successor, Larry Smith, who granted access to the newspaper’s library and photo archives. Special thanks also to Michael Perritt, Pat Duggan, and their colleagues in the library for putting up with and filling my many requests. My thanks as well to Ann Moffat and her colleagues at the Westmount Municipal Library, the oldest public library in Quebec and one of the best. Its stack of Quebec and

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Canadian political titles, hard-copy archives, and on-line resources is second to none. On a personal note, I’m particularly grateful to one long-time friend, Bill Fox, formerly communications director in the Mulroney administration and now a senior vice-president at cn in Montreal, for his encouragement in publishing the second edition of this book. To my daughter, Grace, my thanks for her treasure trove of love and forbearance on weekends, when things we usually did together had to take a back seat to a work in progress. Finally, my profound thanks to Natalie Zenga of McGill University, who has been a unique inspiration in my life. To her and her darling daughter, Natacha, I send my deep and abiding love. L. Ian MacDonald Montreal May 30, 2002

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1 A Change in the Order of Things

“A week is a long time in politics. And a year is an eternity.” —Robert Bourassa, as he often quoted Harold Wilson.

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2 From Bourassa to Bourassa

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3 A Change in the Order of Things

1 “A Change May Be in the Order of Things”

The deadline was closing in with the darkness of the November afternoon. But it was his custom to leave the lead editorial until the end of the day. As always he wrote quickly, and later he said the conclusions came to him only as he was doing the piece. One of the things that struck people about Claude Ryan was his capacity to write the most arduous and closely reasoned editorials with the speed of a wire-service reporter filing a bulletin. In a little more than an hour he would knock out a 1,500-word article that would fill three wide columns over half a page in the next day’s paper. For Ryan, this was the easy part of the job at Le Devoir: the summing up of a situation. The policy of the paper might be arrived at by a tortuous route of consultations, but once a decision was taken, the logic of a Ryan editorial fell easily into place. There would be many who would not comprehend, and many more who would loudly disagree, but everyone who cared about public policy in Quebec would know about a position taken on an important matter by the Montreal daily, whose political influence far exceeded its modest circulation. It was a newspaper with a vocation and he, as its all-powerful editor and publisher, was equally a man with a calling. Only the fourth “director” since the paper’s founding in 1910, Ryan was the full-blooded journalistic heir of its founder, Henri Bourassa, a moral authority in the affairs of French Canada. Now, three days before the 1976 Quebec election, Ryan was at last prepared to pronounce on the foremost question of the day: with considerable misgivings, he would endorse the Parti Québécois. He had

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tipped his hand in an editorial which appeared that morning. “In Quebec, after twelve years of Liberal rule since 1960,” he had concluded, “a change may be in the order of things if the goal of independence can truly and satisfactorily be put in parentheses.” Even then, Ryan had left the question hanging for the conclusion of the two-part editorial, characteristically guarding his options until the very end. Many readers wondered if he would go through with the paper’s prospective endorsement of the pq. To be sure, he was a firm Quebec nationalist, but always within the context of the federal Canadian framework. It was the tradition of the paper, the fleur-de-lys and the maple leaf. Henri Bourassa’s legacy. Claude Ryan’s inheritance. It was not something he treated lightly. He took everything seriously as concerned Le Devoir, a marginally profitable enterprise that he administered with no frills. When he moved the paper into a gloomy old building on St. Sacrament Street in Old Montreal, he consulted an interior decorator who asked how he would like his office done. “In white,” Ryan replied. In this spacious but cheaply furnished room that looked more like a principal’s than a publisher’s office, he was beginning to write the concluding endorsement when his younger brother stuck his head in the doorway. “I don’t want to disturb you,” said Yves Ryan. The older brother waved him in. “Sit over there,” Claude said, “I’ll begin typing the article and I’d like you to see it as I write it.” They might go months without seeing each other. But now Yves, mayor of the distant suburb of Montreal North, said he just happened to be in the neighbourhood of the old city during a Friday afternoon rush hour and decided to drop in. “You worried a lot of people this morning,” he said. “You’re taking a very serious risk.” The director of Le Devoir replied that he thought it was a risk worth taking. But he would say so in the most prudent and ambiguous of terms, covering himself every paragraph inch of the way. The pq was supportable, he indicated, because its chief campaign plank was the promise of good government, with the assurance that its option of independence would be submitted to the people in a referendum. Between the apparently discredited Liberal administration of Robert Bourassa and the leap into the unknown with René Lévesque, the director concluded that it was better “to open the door on the future.” But even as he did so, Ryan left the door open for himself to go the other way. Buried in the middle of the editorial that would be quoted back to him hundreds of times in dozens of contexts, there was a paragraph of which no one later took any notice. “In those ridings where the Liberals or other federalist parties offer superior candidates to

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those of the pq,” he wrote, “ a voter of federalist convictions should have no hesitation in voting for them.” Ryan was thinking particularly of his own riding of Outremont, and nearly said so. But as he was writing, he concluded it was better not to mention names. Reading this as the editorial came out of the typewriter page-by-page, Yves was reasonably satisfied that his brother had covered himself for any political eventuality. “He takes the long way home,” the mayor would later say of his brother, “But he always gets there safely.” In spite of his qualified endorsement of the pq, Ryan would personally take the way out he offered himself. The following Monday, November 15, he would vote for Liberal candidate André Raynauld, whom Bourassa had recruited from the chairmanship of the Economic Council of Canada, and whom Ryan had known for a quarter of a century since Raynauld, like so many other members of Quebec’s political elite, had worked with him in the Catholic Action movements of the post war period. Afterward, Ryan never volunteered this information on his own behalf. And no reporter ever bothered, or dared, to ask. Robert Bourassa always had the first edition of Le Devoir delivered to him and when the paper came out that Friday night in November, he was taping some last-minute, last-ditch commercials at an Englishlanguage television station. “Ryan is recommending a vote for the pq,” he was informed by campaign aide Jean-Pierre Ouellet. “That’s their problem,” Bourassa replied with a rare note of sarcasm in his voice. He did have other things on his mind that night. He was trying desperately to patch up the governing Liberal coalition of the Frenchspeaking middle class and the English-speaking minorities, who gave every indication of deserting him in droves before the election was called and remained surly as the morbid campaign entered its final weekend. Given the high degree of dissatisfaction with the government and the widespread personal antipathy towards the premier – one of his own backbenchers had recently called him the most hated man in the province – it was doubtful the voters would heed Bourassa’s dire warnings of the separatist peril, as they had in the two previous elections. Moreover, a proud Quebec electorate was susceptible to the blandishments of the pq that autumn after experiencing a summer-long backlash in the rest of Canada against bilingual air-traffic control over the skies of Quebec. The wounds were still fresh in September when bilingual announcements were roundly booed at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens during the Canada Cup international hockey series. Ryan

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himself had written in his endorsement that “for English Canada, the election of a Péquiste government would have the effect of a salutary shock.” If Bourassa was not surprised by the editorial posture of Le Devoir, he must have been disappointed. From the beginning of his premiership, he had assiduously courted the favor of the director. Not only did Ryan enjoy being consulted by politicians, he practically required it as a condition of his support. For he was not merely an occupant of a splendid editorial tower, but an active participant in the brawling main street of Quebec politics. Nor did he have any qualms about the normal ethical proprieties that kept journalists at a certain distance from their sources. “There are those,” he had once written, “who see the press as a sort of sanctuary which attends and reports events without being associated with those who make them.” For himself, he was for the larger conception of journalism, “as incarnated in the United States by men like Walter Lippmann and James Reston and in Canada by men like George Brown, John Dafoe, and Henri Bourassa.” The pundit as participant. This was not very humble. But it happened in Ryan’s case, as in the others he had named, to be true. Ryan had stature. And he was not to be easily ignored. Robert Bourassa had done so only once, in 1972, when he shuffled his cabinet without consulting Ryan. The result, Bourassa would recall many years later, was an editorial with the headline, “The Triumph of Mediocrity.” So long as he was premier of Quebec, Bourassa would never again make that mistake. He attached such importance to Le Devoir’s support that when he recruited Yves Ryan as a prospective candidate and cabinet minister before the 1973 election, the premier first had someone check with the publisher to ascertain if he would have an ethical problem writing about a government of which his brother was a member. Claude Ryan sent word back that he would probably have to resign as director of Le Devoir. Bourassa quickly informed Mayor Ryan that while he was most welcome as a member of caucus, he could not enter the cabinet. Ryan declined, not without a touch of bitterness that his activities should be limited by those of his brother. But for Bourassa, it was an easy choice between the Ryan brothers. “I found that Ryan was a valuable man,” he said later. “He was one of the few intellectuals who was supporting us.” Bourassa still considered it important to have Ryan with him, if at all possible, as he pondered the calling of an early election in 1976, only three years after his election to a second term by a landslide of historic proportions that gave the Liberals all but eight ridings in the

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110-seat Quebec National Assembly. But the social and political climate had soured since 1973. The once moribund Union Nationale was resurgent in the polls, gathering an important protest vote. If Bourassa could not reverse the trend, he would lose the next election whenever he called it. And to nip the new Unionist coalition of oldline rural Quebec nationalists and disaffected English-speaking citydwellers, Bourassa was inclined to gamble on an election sooner rather than later. That, as he confided to his Outremont candidate, André Raynauld, among others, was the real reason for the calling an election in the fall of 1976. The pretext upon which he seized in public, however, was the necessity of receiving a fresh mandate to negotiate new constitutional arrangements between the provinces and Ottawa. In the jargon of the day, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was threatening unilateral “patriation” of the British North America Act, it having occurred to Ottawa’s mandarins that “repatriation” of the constitution was a contradiction in terms, since it had never resided in Canada. On a visit to Canada late that September, British Prime Minister Jim Callaghan informed Bourassa that if Trudeau petitioned Westminster for patriation, he would have no alternative but to comply. As Bourassa walked with the British prime minister around the grounds of the Quebec government lodge at Lac à l’Épaule, where Jean Lesage had made the decision to call an election over the nationalization of the hydroelectric companies in 1962, it occurred to the premier that he had the election issue he needed. “In my view this was a determining factor,” he said later. “Without it, I would not have called an election. Because historically Quebec fought unilateral patriation.” So he informed Ryan in early October during a private lunch at the premier’s corner office on the 17th floor of the Hydro-Québec building in Montreal. Ryan later said he was not persuaded by the premier’s arguments, and warned Bourassa “that he would lose an election if he called it that fall.” Bourassa had no such recollection: “He never told me anything like that; I would have remembered.” Bourassa did recall that Ryan had said, as he wrote in the paper the very next day, that an early election “could be justified more easily today because of the extremely quick rhythm which characterizes social and political change.” But whether Ryan warned Bourassa in private that he would lose an autumn election, he did so in his editorial of the following day. Not only did the polls indicate trouble for Bourassa, Ryan noted, but he was getting it from his own private sources, in whom he placed a higher faith. He wrote of attending a banquet just the previous evening to

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mark the 75th anniversary of one of Quebec’s leading financial institutions. Many of those in attendance, who by no means fit the pq voter profile, spoke to him of their dissatisfaction with the Bourassa regime and their intention to support Lévesque in the event of an election. As an editorial touch, this was pure Ryan, a man who liked to say he was in contact with his readers, in touch with his world. He also noted that he had attended a meeting in Montreal’s important Italian community, a bedrock of Liberal support, where a Péquiste panelist received warm applause while two Liberal participants were roundly booed at the very mention of Bourassa’s name. As for Quebec’s English-speaking community, another vital Liberal constituency, they were practically apoplectic over the government’s Bill 22, the 1974 law which made French the official language of the province and introduced proficiency tests as a condition of admittance for immigrants to English-language schools. Noting that Bourassa’s three English-speaking ministers seemed to be in difficulty in their own ridings, Ryan wondered how Bourassa could turn all this around within the space of a few short weeks. Ryan was already sniffing the wind, and carefully weighing his own options. It remained to be seen, he ventured when the election was called a week later, whether the voters would prefer to return the present government “rather than saying yes to a leap into the unknown.” From the outset of the campaign, Ryan had signalled his disposition to consider an endorsement of the pq more seriously than he had in the previous elections of 1970 and 1973. There was the pq’s solemn undertaking to hold a referendum on independence. There was its socialdemocratic orientation, which Ryan thought was a considerable service to the cause of democracy in Quebec. And there was the high level of dissatisfaction, as Ryan himself had noted in his own travels, with the Bourassa government. But Ryan was also a politician, with his own constituency, the intelligentsia as well as the bourgeoisie. The intellectuals had all but given up on him after his endorsement of Bourassa for a second term in 1973, and it may have struck Ryan that this was an opportune moment to recoup. So it seemed to Gérald Leblanc, one of his senior political reporters, and an avowed independantist. “In the previous eighteen months he had become tougher and tougher on Bourassa,” Leblanc later observed; “he thought that Bourassa had served the federalist cause, which was his own, badly.” Years later, Ryan said as much himself. “I kept looking at things and had grown frustrated with the Bourassa government, because I felt they were not delivering the goods,” he said. “In the social field, Bourassa had lost his credibility; for right or wrong reasons, he was no

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longer credible. And we heard more and more stories to the effect that his hold over his cabinet had considerably weakened. Finally, I had difficulty trusting his word as a public figure at that time. At the end of six years in office he would skate all over the place and refuse to face up clearly to an issue. I thought to myself, this is not the kind of leadership to which Quebecers are entitled. And Lévesque, on the other hand, gave exactly the opposite impression. He gave the impression of a man who would tackle the issues squarely. And since they had decided to put their constitutional option between brackets for that election, it appeared to me that it would be a good time to recommend that the people vote for the Parti Québécois.” But it was not until November 9, six days before the election, that Ryan was convinced the pq was likely to win it. On that Tuesday morning, Ryan and his editor-in-chief, Michel Roy, went over to the St. Antoine Street office of The Gazette, where in a fifth-floor boardroom they received the results of a public-opinion poll jointly commissioned by the two Montreal papers, Le Soleil of Quebec City and The Toronto Star. Maurice Pinard was doing most of the talking. A McGill sociologist, Pinard was explaining how he and his colleague Richard Hamilton had worked over the numbers obtained by l’Institut de cueillette de l’information (inci), which had been in the field the previous week. The pq led the Liberals by an astonishing 2 to 1 margin, 52 to 26, among decided voters. Among those decided and leaning, the numbers were virtually unchanged. Even with the most favorable Liberal hypothesis, assuming undecided voters broke the way they did in the 1973 landslide, the pq still led 42 to 35. The numbers spoke for themselves: only the pollster’s margin of error could save Bourassa. And Pinard knew that was unlikely. Fully two-thirds of his respondents, all across the broad but thin spectrum of Quebec’s four million voters, said they were dissatisfied with the government. “Bourassa thought an anti-separatist surge could turn the tide for him as it had in ’73,” Pinard later said. “But the tide had already been turned in ’73. It had nothing to do with separatism, but with their satisfaction with the government, which was then very high.” Ryan was impressed. He knew Pinard was solid, knew his methodology was deep and that his extrapolations of the undecided and “discreet” vote were based on long-established voting patterns. Pinard was also a federalist, one of the Group of Seven that included Pierre Trudeau and Marc Lalonde who drafted the so-called “Canadian Manifesto” in 1964. Moreover, Pinard was a founding member of the Social Research Group, a 1950s outgrowth of the Catholic Action

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movements in which Ryan had spent half his adult life. Even so, Ryan later said he was taken aback. “It went beyond my expectations at that stage of the campaign,” he said. “I hadn’t thought it would be that severe against the government.” Pinard was reluctant to say how sweeping the trend might be in terms of seats. Robert McConnell, then assistant to Gazette publisher Ross Munro, asked if the figures didn’t translate into a range of 70 seats for the pq. Yes, Pinard allowed, if everything broke the right way. “I must say they were all very surprised,” Pinard would recall, “not at the results, but at the predictions.” Throughout most of the meeting, Ryan sat pokerfaced at one end of the table, chatting with Gazette editorial page editor, Tim Creery. In light of the projected results of the election, Michel Roy argued forcefully that the papers should simultaneously publish the second part of the poll, which indicated that a clear majority of respondents was against independence for Quebec. With an occasional word of support from Ryan and Creery, Roy carried the day. At the end of the meeting, Munro and Ryan withdrew to an adjacent boardroom. Munro, practically seized by panic, thought Ryan looked stunned. “But I was so flabbergasted myself, maybe my feelings colored his,” Munro later remembered. Ryan recalled only that Munro was shattered by the poll, “that he could hardly believe it.” Long afterward, many wondered whether the tidings Professor Pinard bore that Tuesday morning tipped the editorial scales at Le Devoir in favor of the pq. “I had the feeling it was important,” Pinard said later, “but that’s all I can say.” For his part, Michel Roy, Ryan’s closest professional associate, thought “it might have played a little bit. It had been a factor that had come into play in the past.” It reminded him, Roy said, of a visit he had made to Tokyo, where he had spoken to editorialists who explained to him that the polls helped them take a position in elections. “I was quite struck by that,” Roy said. “And I found a bit of that with Ryan.” Did the Pinard poll give Ryan a decisive push towards the pq? “No, I really don’t think it did,” he said more than four years after the fact. “Frankly I think if you read all the articles I wrote in the month before the election, there was a strong trend toward the conclusion that was arrived at. But the very conclusion was arrived at only at the writing of the second article. In fact there were those at Le Devoir who shared Gérald Leblanc’s impression that far from encouraging him in that direction, the Pinard poll actually pulled him back from the brink and that until the last minute he was inclined to change his mind. “There’s one thing you have to remember about Ryan,” said Michel Roy, who worked with

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him for all of his fifteen years at the paper, “and that is that he has deep convictions on the national question, on the constitutional future of Canada and Quebec. “And he was unreservedly opposed to the fundamental thesis of the pq. But he was also quite convinced that we needed a bit of cleaning up in the Quebec government. So he was ready to take the risk of supporting the pq, on condition it wouldn’t be for independence, but only for good government.” As the polls closed on November 15, the premier of Quebec was beginning the ritual of his daily swim. Nearly every day he was in office, wherever he was, he would swim between a quarter and a third of a mile. For some reason he had always refused to join a private athletic club, and insisted on swimming at public pools, as he did this night at the Centre Notre Dame on Queen Mary Road in the west end of Montreal. His critics thought it was typical of his obsession with his image. His friends thought it might have more to do with his workingclass roots in his east-central Montreal riding of Mercier, a marginal Liberal seat which he refused to abandon, in spite of all advice before calling this election, in favor of the safe Liberal fortress of Outremont. He would pay for that hubris later in the evening, going down to personal defeat. But by then he fully expected to lose his seat. Only the day before, an aide had shown him a specially commissioned Gallup poll which indicated he would be defeated in his own riding by Gérald Godin, the radical journalist and poet who would go on to become Lévesque’s immigration minister and unofficial ambassador to English-speaking Canada. What Bourassa thought, as he slipped into the pool on the evening of November 15, was that he had a chance, “not much of a chance, but a chance,” of forming a minority government and forging a coalition with Union Nationale leader Rodrigue Biron. He wasn’t long in having his answer. When he came out of the pool at 7:30, his 16-year-old son François informed him of the early returns: the pq elected and leading in six seats to the Liberal’s one. Bourassa knew that an early election night trend is seldom if ever reversed. “It’s finished,” he told his son. The pq would finish the evening with a 41 to 34 lead in the popular vote and a clear majority of 71 seats to the Liberals’ 26. Professor Pinard’s projections and predictions were to prove eerily and unerringly accurate. Half an hour later, as Bourassa’s Cadillac made its way downtown to his headquarters at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, there was already dancing in the streets. Presently, a celebration was also underway at Le Devoir. “In the newsroom, they were joyful,” Ryan later recalled. “They were exuberant, I was not. I thought it was a good outcome, but I was not

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especially exuberant.” One celebrant was Ryan’s former ace police reporter, Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, who had run in the election for the pq and to his very great surprise had been elected in the Montreal-area riding of Verchères. “I can’t share your enthusiasm,” Ryan told him, “because I supported that party for other reasons than you.” Spending a good part of the evening in the newsroom, Ryan had a special word with Gérald Leblanc, the former priest from Acadia who now declared Quebec to be his country. “You won’t believe this,” Ryan told him, “but in the end I’m glad the pq is in power. In opposition everything has been so easy for them. Everyone thinks they’re so wonderful. Now we’ll see what they can do.” Nevertheless, Ryan appraised the election of the pq as “the most important political event in Quebec since the end of the Second World War.” In a previously scheduled address the next day at the Chambre de Commerce, Ryan set an agenda for the incoming government, and warned that he would hold the pq to its promises. The organizers of the luncheon had sold only a few hundred tickets before the election, but on the morning after, over one thousand persons turned up, jamming every corner of the hotel ballroom. They seemed to hang on Ryan’s every word. Already, the search for a moral figure, if not a savior, had begun. Ryan had a few parting shots for Bourassa. The defeated government, he said, was composed of a bunch of schoolkids. The outgoing premier, he suggested, should immediately resign the Liberal leadership. It was a theme he took up in the Wednesday edition of Le Devoir. Sitting alone in his Quebec office, the body still warm, as he later said, Bourassa heard this on a radio news report. This was one subject, he thought, on which he needed no advice from Ryan. He had already made up his mind to quit the leadership at year’s end, and told his wife on the night of his defeat that he would go to Europe to study and teach for at least a year. And so it ended for Bourassa. He had gambled and lost it all, apparently washed up at the tender political age of 43. And thus it began for Ryan. Because of Bourassa’s fatal miscalculation, the Quebec Liberal party would be searching for a new leader who could respond to the political context created by the accession of the pq. Ryan had written as much in the final lines of his November 13 editorial endorsement of the pq. “To defeat the Liberals,” he had concluded, “would force them to profoundly revise their leadership and policy with a view to some of the most demanding confrontations ever seen in Quebec.” How far the Liberal party would go in that direction, how far it would carry him along with it, was not something Ryan could ever have imagined then.

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2 The Liberal Establishment: Picking Up the Pieces

It was not the first time Philippe Casgrain had been host to a series of informal meetings at the Club St. Denis. Ten years earlier, following the Liberal party’s previous defeat in June of 1966, Casgrain had convened the leading lights of the party at this citadel of the bourgeoisie. René Lévesque, then still a year away from breaking with the party over his constitutional option, was a regular participant in Casgrain’s soirées. Another occasional guest was Robert Bourassa, the 33-yearold former secretary of a Quebec royal commission on taxation, now a freshman backbencher with an opportunity to make a name for himself as opposition finance critic. Other Liberal legislators and activists would join the group as they talked vaguely about policy directions for the party, but seldom did they discuss what was really on their minds: the leadership of the party in the post-Lesage era. The Quiet Revolution was over. Its patron was tired. The final months of his six-year premiership had become something of an imperial reign. But no one dared to tell Jean Lesage that his political life was nearing an end. He lingered nearly four years in opposition, serving as a transitional figure who paved the way for his successor to restore the Liberal dynasty. When he retired from politics in 1970, it was with exemplary grace. Since the public phase of his life was now over, he made no further appearances in public, content to serve as a highly paid legislative counsellor to the new Bourassa government. In the last years of his life, Lesage slipped comfortably into the role of the party’s elder statesman, whom everyone addressed as “M’sieu Lesage.” But in 1966, even in defeat, he was still very much a

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force, a figure of considerable moral authority who was not to be lightly crossed. And so as they sat around the St. Denis Club in the fall of 1966, they talked their way warily around the edges of the leadership question. Philippe Casgrain, then as later, was nothing more or less than a member in good standing of the Liberal establishment. A senior partner in the boardroom law firm of Byers Casgrain, he was then married to Claire Kirkland-Casgrain, the first woman to hold cabinet rank in Quebec history. He was not the sort who was around very much when the party was in office, usually refusing “government mandates,” as patronage work is known in Quebec law firms, saying it wasn’t worth the trouble. All he wanted, when the party was in power, was to be able to make the big phone call on behalf of an important client. A decade later, as the Liberals began to pick up the pieces after the shattering defeat of November 1976, Casgrain would again become an important figure in the renewal of the party. The interim leader, Gérard D. Lévesque, was a Quebecer who went to Montreal as infrequently as possible and was not well-connected within his own party there. It made sense that he should reach out to someone like Casgrain, as he did one night in the early winter of 1977, to organize a policy convention as a first step on the long road back. Extremely sociable, highly opinionated, capable of talking a blue streak in two languages, Casgrain knew nearly everyone who counted in the party in Montreal. And since he had no political ambitions of his own, he was a natural instigator for the renewal process. He was by no means alone. The group he gathered around him at the St. Denis was one of many informal Liberal committees, most then unaware of the activities of the others, who would eventually coalesce in the choice of the new leader. But of the many groups meeting after hours in Montreal boardrooms and drawing rooms, the Casgrain committee was the most high-powered and influential. For starters, it had a mandate from the interim leader to pull together a policy meeting of the party, which he was determined should be held prior to a leadership convention. A wily parliamentary veteran of the Lesage and Bourassa administrations, Gérard D. Lévesque was in no rush to accommodate the panic-stricken members of the party who clamored for an early leadership congress. After twenty years on the front bench of the National Assembly, the interim leader knew the rhythms of Quebec politics, knew the Liberals were at an ebb, knew the flow was with the pq, knew that a leader should be chosen only after the government’s high tide had receded. By persuading the party to busy itself with preparations for a policy meeting in the fall of 1977, Lévesque could delay the leadership convention until the following year.

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That sat well with the members of the Casgrain committee, who in their surgical post-mortems of the events of November 15 agreed that the party had given itself as a hostage to the previous leader. Analyzing the causes of the electoral debacle, they agreed it was vitally necessary to determine a policy orientation that would be binding on the new leader. Apart from its policy mandate, the St. Denis group was terribly important by virtue of its composition. There were eight of them in all, four “ministerial” level members of the party and another four from its ranks of executive assistants. The senior members of the group besides Casgrain were Fernand Lalonde, Thérèse Lavoie-Roux and André Raynauld. Lalonde, solicitor-general in the defeated government of his law school classmate Robert Bourassa, had withstood the onslaught of November 15 and retained his seat in the legislature. Lavoie-Roux and Raynauld, though only first-term members of the National Assembly, had been the most prestigious recruits of the defeated premier. Lavoie-Roux had been the head of the Montreal Catholic School Commission. Raynauld had been chairman of the Economic Council of Canada. They gave the party a badly needed semblance of intellectual legitimacy. The junior members of the group, all in their late twenties or early thirties, were to become its operatives in the organization and manipulation of the policy convention in the fall of 1977. Jean-Pierre Ouellet, a Rhodes scholar who had worked in Bourassa’s office before entering private law practice in Montreal, was considered the intellectual of the foursome. The legmen were José Dorais, formerly a ministerial aide in the provincial justice department, and Charles Bélanger, a young courthouse administrator who would become executive assistant to Secretary of State Francis Fox upon the federal Liberals’ return to office in 1980. But the key player was Richard Mongeau, later counsel to the McDonald Royal Commission into wrongdoing by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Before the defeat of the Bourassa regime in 1976, Mongeau had been executive assistant to Social Affairs Minister Claude Forget. Running the day-to-day affairs of the largest department in the Quebec government, Mongeau had developed and maintained a vast network of contacts across the province. Moreover, he was well-connected with the federal Liberals through his brother, JeanPierre Mongeau, then director-general of the Liberal Party of Canada’s Quebec wing. Jean-Pierre Mongeau was a new breed of back-room boy. Dispensing patronage was of little interest to him. A terrible administrator, he was a master of political intrigue. A one-time junior aide to the prime minister in the early Trudeau years, Mongeau had been executive assis-

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tant to Marc Lalonde before returning to Montreal to mastermind political intelligence for the federal Liberal party. Talking incessantly on the telephone, he cultivated his own province-wide network of contacts who kept him abreast of developments in all political circles, not the least in those of the new pq government. The defeat of the Bourassa government had hardly been declared before J.P. Mongeau’s phone began ringing. Though the federal and provincial parties had separated into autonomous entities in the midsixties, largely so that each would feel free to develop its own constitutional policy, they were effectively one and the same party at the grass-roots level. One of the residual Liberal strengths was that, though the provincial party was now out of power, its membership could turn to the “cousins,” very much in power in Ottawa. “When one leg is cut off,” as pollster Maurice Pinard had suggested, “it still has another leg to stand on.” Never was this source of Liberal strength more apparent than in the days after the triumph of the pq. And never were the party rank and file more in need of sustenance and comfort. Seldom were they more susceptible to takeover by the cousins. For Lalonde, who had a wellearned reputation as a political hardball player, the temptation to move in on the provincial Liberals may have been difficult to resist. JeanPierre Mongeau later said he had “an enormous debate,” with Lalonde and Trudeau’s chief Quebec organizer André Ouellet, who were “a bit worried” about the evident disarray in provincial Liberal ranks and “tried to take control” of the party and dominate the leadership convention. As Mongeau later recalled his discussions with Lalonde and Ouellet, he tried to persuade them that their role was to be supportive of the provincial party until it could again support itself, not to attempt a takeover while it was in a weakened state. Ouellet later denied this. “You mustn’t exaggerate,” Ouellet said, pointing out that he was an early exponent of the view that the provincials should turn for leadership to an outsider. “My own idea from the outside,” Ouellet later maintained, “was that as long as the Liberals didn’t choose someone who as a former minister or federal minister,” they would be well placed to win the next election. Among others, to Ouellet’s way of thinking, this eliminated his colleague, Jean Chrétien, the minister of finance. Within the Casgrain group as elsewhere, the idea of Chrétien or anyone else from the federal cabinet as a prospective leader, was dismissed much more quickly than it was by the news media, or for that matter, by Chrétien himself. “There was a lot of resentment against the feds at those meetings,” recalled Jean-Pierre Ouellet. “We figured they had

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cost us three or four points in the campaign.” Indeed, the provincial Liberals were still simmering with resentment over Trudeau’s Quebec City speech in March of 1976, in which he denounced Bill 22 as politically stupid. Earlier that day, as he entered the lobby of Bourassa’s office, the prime minister had replied to a reporter’s casual question about their luncheon menu by saying “everyone knows Mr. Bourassa likes hot dogs.” The headline, with Trudeau calling Bourassa a “mangeur de hot dog,” did the premier considerable damage. The provincial Liberals were also bitter over the federal government’s wishy-washy solution to the Gens de l’Air dispute over bilingual commercial flight controls in Quebec during the summer of 1976. While Trudeau went on television to describe the situation as the gravest threat to Canadian unity since the conscription crisis of the Second World War, he was able to defuse the situation only to the extent of naming a commission of inquiry, which eventually reported its findings that bilingual air traffic control was perfectly safe. But that was not until 1979, long after the damage had been done on the provincial hustings in the fall of 1976. Any gains the Bourassa government might have made with moderate nationalists over Bill 22 went down the drain in the Gens de l’Air crisis. But perhaps most damaging of all had been the federal government’s policy of tightening milk production quotas in the summer of 1976. This enraged Quebec’s dairy farmers, many of whom relied entirely on milk production for their incomes. A delegation of militant Quebec farmers went to Ottawa that summer and splattered milk all over the face of Agriculture Minister Eugene Whelan. The feds still didn’t get the message and the angry farmers took it out on Bourassa at the polls that fall. “That milk policy,” said Jean-Pierre Ouellet, “cost us badly in the Eastern Townships. Everywhere there were cows, we got murdered.” But most of all, in circles like the St. Denis group, Quebec Liberals knew they had mostly themselves and Bourassa to blame. While the former premier took up temporary exile in Brussels that winter to study the economic federalism of the European Common Market, his one-time adherents were harsh in their judgments of him for events that got out of control during his second term. After the excellent technocratic reforms of his first administration, including a massive consolidation of hospital services, Bourassa’s second government was plagued by a series of public-service strikes, a succession of minor scandals, and runaway spending at the James Bay and Olympic construction sites. As the government lurched from one crisis to the next, the premier seemed to be its principal crisis manager. With few other ministers in public view, the government appeared weak. Its leader

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looked irresolute and obsessed with his standing in public opinion polls. Drawing on these perceptions of the causes of their defeat, Quebec Liberals gradually sketched a rough composite of the kind of leader they needed in the post-Bourassa era. First, they wanted someone with proven intellectual credentials to do battle with the pq in the coming referendum. Second, they had to find someone with no links to the past, specifically with the discredited Bourassa administration. Third, they were looking for a leader of unquestioned moral integrity. “Everyone,” as Jean-Pierre Ouellet later put it, “was very sensitive about the public morality issue.” Quebec Liberals were looking for someone, as Jean-Pierre Mongeau summarized it, “who was free of the past, someone who wasn’t a puppet of Ottawa.” Above all, they were looking for someone who could win the referendum for the federalist side. These stringent criteria effectively eliminated prospective candidates from Ottawa like Chrétien, and otherwise attractive leadership possibilities such as Raymond Garneau, the able minister of finance in the Bourassa government. Widely liked within the party, Garneau was written off by the Liberal establishment because of his links with the defeated government. Before very long, in the Casgrain group as in other informal gatherings, the emerging consensus was that the party must look for an “outsider.” The name of Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau came up and was quickly discarded because of his association with the scandalous Olympic cost overruns and because he was known to be a political loner. Among all the prospective candidates, one stood out: Claude Ryan. His name was mentioned in the Casgrain group as early as January of 1977. It would be a few months before the various members of the Liberal establishment in Montreal would get around to discussing it with Ryan. But the idea immediately took hold, and the fact that he had so recently endorsed the pq was not considered an important obstacle to his candidacy. As Casgrain cheerfully told Ryan in their preliminary discussions months later, “if anything, you made the same mistake as thousands of others.” This was a tribute to the Liberals’ capacity to put the past behind them, to say nothing of their pragmatism. For Quebec Liberals, who considered themselves born to rule, the instinct for power quickly reasserted itself in the winter of 1977. There would be a long, twilight struggle, but already they were confident of emerging victorious. As for their defeat, it was quickly rationalized as an opportunity for renewal. The victory of the pq soon came to be regarded as an accident of history.

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Claude Ryan did not think so. At least, if he thought so, he did not then say so. As early as a speech before the Canadian Club of Montreal in late November of 1976, and the next month in a column for Maclean’s magazine, he maintained that the pq victory was neither an accident “nor the erratic product of spontaneous growth.” Rather, he asserted, “it marks the return to power in Quebec of a school of thought that has always played a key role in our collective life.” The fundamental difference between René Lévesque and his nationalist forebears such as Honoré Mercier and Maurice Duplessis was that “the new party in power in Quebec not only questions the federal structure but is resolved to replace it with a structure in which the first and ultimate locus of power will reside in Quebec.” Just so. And though Ryan was soon quarreling with the new government, he sent up a number of friendly signals at the very beginning of the Lévesque era. On the day after the cabinet was unveiled by Premier Lévesque, Ryan wrote a positively lyrical commentary in Le Devoir about the “impressive dignity” of the televised ceremony from the old Legislative Council chamber of the National Assembly. “Clear and incisive as always, calmer and graver than he usually is,” Ryan wrote of the new premier, “Mr. Lévesque dominated, as he should have, this first day of his new government.” But Lévesque either failed to receive the warm message or failed to be moved by it. In either case, he wasted none of his time consulting Ryan. It was the premier’s first step on the road to making an important adversary for his government. “I’ve been used to governments who would have a great respect for the paper, and myself in particular, who would heed my opinions to a large extent,” Ryan later said with a characteristic lack of modesty that nevertheless accurately described his role in those years. “But we rapidly realized with the Lévesque government,” he continued, “that it was going to be somewhat different, you know, and they would like to keep their distance. And they would like, in effect, to ignore what would be written. Especially by myself.” In short, Ryan’s feelings were hurt. He would marshal his criticisms and bide his time, awaiting the right moment to unload on the new administration. He did not have long to wait. Only two months after the swearing-in of the new government, on January 25, 1977, the premier flew to New York for an important engagement before the Economic Club of New York, a forum for Wall Street movers and shakers. Quoting extensively from the American Declaration of Independence, Lévesque delivered a finely crafted but poorly observed address that squarely stated the separatist aims of his party. Understandably, the audience was unmoved.

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And at least one member of the audience, Claude Ryan, was very angry. “I felt we were being betrayed,” Ryan recalled. “You know, after all the assurances they had given that their constitutional option would be put between brackets, for the premier to come up on such a formal occasion and assert as clearly as he did the option for independence of his party as implicitly as he suggested, was very shocking to me. And I said to myself, I won’t let that go that way, because the thing I had always been afraid of in Quebec would be the kind of drift that would lead us to a conclusion we didn’t want, because of our indifference or passiveness. I thought to myself, I will not be an accomplice to that. Being editor of Le Devoir, I felt it was my duty to react in the way which I felt I should, regardless of the mood of the time.” Back in Montreal the next day, Ryan wrote his first substantive criticism of the new regime. In an editorial entitled, “Why the New York trip was a failure,” Ryan leveled Lévesque for misreading his audience, and for saying things he had lacked the candor and the courage to say at home. “Though Mr. Lévesque’s vigorous and original personality made a favorable impression on his hosts,” Ryan concluded, “the message he delivered did quite the opposite: it contributed to prolonging, rather than ending, the anxious state they are now in, due to new sources of tension in a country of which they are quite fond.” As for Lévesque’s subsequent charge that an “Anglo-Canadian fifth column” of businessmen had infiltrated the audience to sabotage his welcome, Ryan later acknowledged that many Canadians attending Lévesque’s address greeted his speech with “excessive abruptness.” But from there, “to infer, as Mr. Lévesque did, that these elements were responsible for the skeptical reactions to his address, is to twist the truth unashamedly, and to credit the premier’s American hosts with less intelligence than they possess.” But it wasn’t until April, when Cultural Development Minister Camille Laurin published the Charter of the French Language, that Ryan declared an abrupt end to the government’s honeymoon. “In its present form,” he wrote of what was then Bill One, and would later be enacted as Bill 101, “the Lévesque government will have succeeded in saddling Quebec with some of the most stifling restrictions ever seen in linguistic and administrative matters. At first glance, the shocking thing about this bill is the rigid, dogmatic, possessive and authoritarian manner with which it attempts to decree the exclusive use of French.” And that was just the beginning. His criticisms of the Laurin bill were withering and unrelenting. “Starting from there,” said Le Devoir editor-in-chief Michel Roy, “the campaign of editorials hostile to the pq was unceasing, and reached a crescendo that lasted until his departure. I found the tone a

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bit excessive. But by then it was evident that the battle, not the battle but the war, against the pq had begun.” In the beginning, at least, Ryan found that it was a lonely fight. The government was riding the wave of its popularity and paid no attention to Ryan’s criticisms. “I think I was perhaps the most persistent and active opponent of that piece of legislation,” he said. “But they would speak and act as if I just did not exist. As if nothing had been said. You know, they were continually invoking that atmosphere of unanimity which allegedly existed around their legislation. And I said to myself, ‘I hope to God that Quebec will never drift into such a state of intellectual conformity.’” Ryan was particularly hurt that he was not invited to debate the language legislation on Radio-Canada. It was on English-language television, on the CBC regional program “Decision,” that he finally had a memorable dustup with Dr. Laurin in early June. The argument continued for many minutes after the conclusion of the program. If Laurin wouldn’t introduce generous amendments to the bill, Ryan warned his longtime acquaintance, “you’ll force me to go into politics, and I wouldn’t like that at all.” But by then a lot of Liberals had the same idea, and in those days they liked it a lot. In a way, Ryan had already become leader of the opposition in Quebec. And the drafting of Claude Ryan for the Liberal leadership, over the summer and into the fall of 1977, was simply confirmation of the obvious. Ryan couldn’t be exactly sure, but afterwards he thought Pierre Mercier might have been the first person to broach the idea of the Liberal leadership with him. It was one day in May or June and Ryan, true to his frugal nature, was having lunch as he often did at Murray’s restaurant near the newspaper in Old Montreal. A corporate lawyer whose own office was nearby, Mercier was one of those establishment Liberal figures who, like Casgrain, surfaced after a defeat. A good deal more discreet than his colleague, Mercier remained completely in the background, practically unknown to political reporters. In fact, he played a critical role in persuading Ryan to enter the leadership race. Mercier had married into the Liberal party. His father-in-law, Elie Beauregard, had been speaker of the Senate in the St. Laurent era. It was much the same family history with Gilles Hébert, who would become the other key fund-raiser in the Ryan campaign. A successful municipal lawyer in his own right, he was the son of G. René Hébert, a lumber magnate and for many years the provincial Liberal bagman in Montreal. The elder Hébert actually carried a little black book with all the right phone numbers in it. Like father, like son. One of Gilles

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Hébert’s neighbors, a couple of blocks over in the upper reaches of Outremont, was Pierre Mercier. Contemporaries at the University of Montreal law school in the mid-fifties, they had quietly been scouting leadership prospects in the spring of 1977. It occurred to them, as it had to the members of the Casgrain group, that Ryan was an intriguing possibility. “He was the man of the moment,” Mercier later said of the Draft Ryan period in 1977. But at the beginning, the notion seemed so preposterous, even to those people behind it, that they didn’t quite know how to bring it up with Ryan. When he bumped into Ryan at Murray’s that day, Mercier casually asked if his brother Yves might be interested in the leadership and would the publisher have a word with him about it. When they met again a few days later, Ryan brusquely informed Mercier that he should find another intermediary if he wished to initiate serious conversations with the mayor of Montreal North. “I was kidding the other day,” Mercier replied, “It’s you some people will be after. I want you to think about it. I’m dead serious.” Ryan had a busy round of speaking engagements that spring, and he was beginning to hear the same thing from people who came up to him after meetings. It was a season when voters wanted to hear new ideas on the constitutional question. And wherever people began talking seriously of renewed federalism and a third option, Ryan was invariably a keynote speaker or a panelist who stood out from the rest. Before long, Liberal activists began to match his face with the constitutional issue. At a spring seminar sponsored by the young federal Liberals in Montreal, Ryan shared the stage with Claude Forget; the Quebec Liberal constitutional critic, Gérald Beaudoin, dean of the University of Ottawa law school who would later serve on the Task Force on Canadian Unity; and Jean-Paul L’Allier, the former communications minister in the Bourassa government and a leading spokesman for the nationalist wing of the Liberal party. And there was Ryan, who somehow seemed better prepared, who seemed to have thought things through as he talked about how to renew the Canadian link. Sitting in the first row, Lucette St. Amant turned to former federal cabinet minister Jean-Pierre Goyer and said: “Our chief, we’ve found him.” Lucette St. Amant could start a leadership campaign all by herself. As a young woman, she had come to Montreal from Rouyn-Noranda nearly twenty years before to work as a publicist in the election that vaulted Jean Lesage to office. She had worked in every election since. Lesage thought enough of her to have her fly back from Paris, where she was studying, to run the publicity side of his 1962 election on the nationalization of electricity. The natural resources minister, René

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Lévesque, met her at Dorval Airport, and briefed her on the nationalization plans. She knew Robert Bourassa well enough to warn him that if he called an election in the fall of 1976, he would be a private citizen by Christmas. Like Casgrain, Mercier and Hébert, she had never looked for rewards when the party was in office, and so was around to help pick up the pieces after a defeat. She was a formidable woman, an organizational whirlwind and a non-stop talking machine who wasn’t the least bit shy about approaching Ryan. She marched right up to him after the meeting and planted herself squarely in his path. “Everyone is wondering what we’re going to do for a leader,” she told him. “Well, we’ve found him.” Ryan laughed at the suggestion, as he was inclined to do whenever it was made, but in fact he rather fancied the idea. Before long he was discussing it with some trusted friends and associates. “From the summer of ’77 on,” recalled Michel Roy of Le Devoir, “hardly a day passed that he didn’t speak to me about it. He spoke of it constantly. One sensed that it was a major preoccupation for him. Some days he was enthusiastic and talked of the things he could do, and other days he saw the danger of the Liberal party, and thought it would never change. He thought, ‘no I’m wasting my time with that, I’m better to remain in journalism.’” Ryan discussed the possibility of his candidacy with at least one important visitor to Le Devoir, Finance Minister Jean Chrétien, himself a prospective candidate. In Montreal to attend a baseball game one night in June, Chrétien and his trusted aide Eddie Goldenberg called on Ryan. They had a wide-ranging discussion that eventually settled on what was on both their minds: “I see three possible candidates,” the director said. “Claude Castonguay, you and me.” Chrétien thought he was hearing things. Goldenberg told him he had heard right. Several years later, reminded of the incident and asked if he had been joking, Ryan gave a cryptic one word reply: “Probably.” There is no question that in the summer of 1977, Chrétien rather fancied his own chances. At the age of forty-three, “Le p’tit gars de Shawinigan” had already come a long way in national politics. He was the first finance minister of French-Canadian origin in Canadian history. But he could then go no higher in Ottawa. Trudeau, riding the crest of his popularity on the national unity issue that summer, was certainly in no hurry to retire. And even when he did leave, the road to the Liberal succession appeared blocked to Chrétien by the party’s tradition of alternating French and English-speaking leaders. Chrétien liked to say, then as later, that it hadn’t prevented eight English-speaking candidates from running against Trudeau for the leadership in 1968. But Chrétien must have known that many of his own caucus colleagues

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from Quebec were among the most determined that the principle of alternation be maintained after Trudeau’s retirement, so that they could put in a claim for one of their own the next time around. And so Chrétien was looking around in 1977, quietly scouting his own prospects. The fact that he was from the federal side was considered a serious obstacle to his candidacy, especially among journalists and intellectuals. But hadn’t Jean Lesage himself, father of the Quiet Revolution, come from Otttawa in 1958 after a stretch in the St. Laurent government as minister of Indian Affairs? That, said the intellectuals, was twenty years ago. Besides, Chrétien was too closely aligned with the centralist policies of Trudeau. He was also sneered at for his “My Rockies” speeches, so well received in Western Canada but an embarrassment to some people at home who saw him as some kind of performer in a minstrel show. Still, there was a vacuum of leadership in the Quebec Liberal party in 1977, and Chrétien was prepared to step into it if he could be sure of having no serious rivals at the convention. He was not without important support in the business community, notably from his friends at Power Corporation, where his former executive assistant, John Rae, now worked as an executive in Paul Desmarais’ holding company. Desmarais was Chrétien’s kind of guy, a brash kid from a small town who had made it big in a world that had formerly been considered an exclusively English-speaking domain. More than that, Chrétien and Desmarais were fast friends. If and when Chrétien decided to go for the leadership, he could count on important moral and financial support from the influential Desmarais circle in Montreal. Moreover, after Trudeau himself, no federal minister was more popular than Chrétien among Montreal’s English and minority ethnic communities, core constituencies for the Liberals. He was the only big name to turn up at a Forum rally organized early that summer by some nervous Englishspeaking residents of West-End Montreal who wanted to show the flag at the height of the separatist scare. Chrétien also had some prominent supporters in the National Assembly caucus, notably Michel Gratton, the Gatineau mna and founder of the Quebec-Canada movement, and John Ciaccia, who represented Trudeau’s silk-stocking district of Mount Royal in the National Assembly and who had been Chrétien’s assistant deputy minister of Indian Affairs. But that wasn’t enough. And as Chrétien well knew, none of these elements represented the establishment wing of the Quebec Liberal party. They would come to him only if there was no one else, only if the overtures to Ryan proved fruitless, only if someone like Claude Castonguay turned them down. Castonguay, who had been minister of Social Affairs in the first Bourassa administration, had an immense and

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possibly inflated reputation as its only intellectual before he left government to go into business in Quebec City in 1973. As head of a large Quebec insurance firm, Castonguay’s reputation had grown, if anything, in the years since he quit politics. He was not much of a public speaker – even Ryan’s speeches were stemwinders by comparison – but he was cerebral, competent and clean, the qualities the Liberals were looking for. Often in touch with Ryan, Castonguay made it clear that he was interested in the leadership only if Ryan wasn’t. And there was always André Raynauld, who had come from Ottawa to be sure, but had been an independent figure as head of the Economic Council. He, too, met the intellectual criteria and qualified as an outsider. The establishment would have preferred either Castonguay or Raynauld to Chrétien. If Chrétien were to seriously consider leaving Ottawa to run for the Liberal leadership in Quebec, the active opposition of Le Devoir would be the last thing he needed among intellectuals and establishmentarians. And so he went to Ryan a second time in the month of June and made it clear that he would be available under the right circumstances. Chrétien later claimed this was a private and confidential conversation in Ryan’s confessional, as some people called his office at the newspaper. But Ryan, being a newspaperman and perhaps wanting to test the climate of Chrétien’s prospective candidacy against his own, gave the story to Michel Roy. After checking the story with his own sources in Ottawa, Roy wrote it himself and ran it prominently on page one the following day. It created no boomlet for Chrétien and the finance minister was forced to issue an angry denial that he had any intention of leaving Ottawa. That cleared the way for Ryan. By the time he went on vacation in the Laurentians north of Montreal, the newspaper publisher had some serious thinking to do. He spent a good deal of his leisure time reading a copy of the correspondence between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, the two great unifying figures of the United Canadas in the 1840s. Ryan may have thought he could play such a role himself. Though he was still inclined not to enter the undeclared leadership race, he found the pressures on him mounting. For one thing, the members of the Casgrain group had decided to make him the central figure of the party’s November policy convention by inviting him to give the keynote address. The invitation was conveyed over lunch before Ryan went on vacation in early July by the convention chairman, Michel Robert, whom Casgrain had recommended for the job to Gérard D. Lévesque. A young law professor and labor lawyer who was also known as the “silver-tongued advocate” in courthouse circles, Robert was himself considered an attractive

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longshot possibility for the leadership. “We discussed thoroughly what would be his participation in the congress,” Robert remembered, “but at the end he himself started to ask me about the subject of leadership. I think he was basically interested to know if I was a candidate. I told him I was not interested and that he would make a good candidate. I think he was pleased with that. I think in hindsight the important part of the lunch was the last five minutes.” With Ryan’s appearance set for the November convention, the ground was now prepared for Casgrain to go public with the Draft Ryan movement. It turned up for the first time on the front page of The Gazette in mid-September. Suddenly, Ryan was beseiged by callers assuring him of their support. He was forced to issue a statement in his own newspaper saying the story was essentially true, and that he was seriously considering running for the leadership. Thus began what would later be known as Ryan’s first period of reflection.

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3 “This Damn Word Irrevocable”

From the time Ryan was named publisher of Le Devoir in 1964, hardly an election passed without his being approached to run for office at one level or another, for one party or another. Mike Pearson was the first to go after him before the 1965 federal campaign, when the prime minister was trying to put together a team of new faces from Quebec that would be led by labor leader Jean Marchand, newspaper editor and columnist Gérard Pelletier, and a wealthy but obscure law professor named Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Except for the fact that he was a loner by nature, Ryan might have been persuaded to join them. And so to Pearson and other federal or provincial leaders who courted him as a candidate, Ryan’s answer was always the same. Though he was undoubtedly flattered by the attention, he was too deeply involved in his work, and wouldn’t even consider it. He didn’t exclude the possibility of entering politics one day. But if that time ever came, as Aurelian Leclerc noted in an early study of Ryan, he hoped to be chosen by the voters rather than imposed by a party. When Ryan’s moment finally arrived in the fall of 1977, when he was being offered not just a seat but the leadership on a silver platter, the difficulty was not in persuading him that he could be chosen by the people so much as in convincing him that he could be imposed on the Quebec Liberals. And in those months, even some of his staunchest supporters entertained serious doubts about his suitability for a political career. As he vacillated for weeks, Ryan seemed hopelessly incapable of making up his mind. His self-proclaimed period of reflection became

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an agony of indecision. Ryan made things worse for himself by announcing deadlines for deciding whether he would run, and then pushing them back. Finally, he was determined to make his intentions known before the policy convention where he was scheduled to give the keynote address on November 19. In this, he ignored the advice of Casgrain, Gilles Hébert, and others who had implored him not to decide one way or another before attending the convention where he could measure his reception against the confident assurances he had been receiving from his supporters. They were under the impression that he was coming through a maze of consultation to a positive decision for making the leadership race. By early November it was generally assumed in Montreal journalistic and political circles that he had gone too far down the road to turn back, that he had compromised his professional purity at Le Devoir. Suddenly, almost impulsively, Ryan announced on November 7 that he would not run. His decision, he concluded in a statement published in his own paper the next day, was “firm and irrevocable.” It was the word “irrevocable” that slammed the door on the Liberal party. And, as Ryan would soon discover, his own foot was caught in it. Later, when the draft started up again, he would wonder if there was a way of getting out of “this damn word, irrevocable.” Before issuing the statement, Ryan showed it to his editor-in-chief, who urged him to take it out. “But it was a guarantee against himself,” Roy surmised. “He wanted to raise a barrier against himself.” Ryan himself would later admit that this was exactly what he had in mind. Ryan’s decision not to run in November had its origins in his conviction that he could not win the convention without the support of the Liberal establishment. And he had profound doubts, despite the frantic efforts the establishment was making on his behalf, that it was really supporting him. Then, as his brother Gerry Ryan observed, the draft was still spontaneous and uncoordinated, lacking an organizational core. “Up to then the organizational efforts had not been very inspired,” said Judge Ryan a member of the Quebec Superior Court and the oldest of the three brothers. “They were more panic-inspired than anything else.” Moreover, Ryan was for some reason terribly concerned about the sullied financial image of the party, which had always subsisted on corporate donations. Such donations were being outlawed by the Lévesque government, but Ryan still wondered about financial skeletons in the Liberal closet that might come back to haunt him later on. “He was terribly worried,” as Michel Robert recalled, “about the finances of the party that may have been obtained in an improper or even illegal way.”

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In sum, Ryan was afraid the Liberal party would not support someone like him, in spite of the new, democratic procedures that had been adopted by a general council of the party in Sherbrooke that September. The new ground rules required that one-third of the delegates be Young Liberals, and another one-third women. There would be twenty-four delegates from each of the 110 ridings, 2640 delegates in all. Even sitting members of the National Assembly would have to get themselves elected in their own riding associations. Most significantly, there would be no delegates-at-large, a break with custom in most Canadian parties. This would make it almost impossible to pack the convention, as the party’s former chief organizer, Paul Desrochers, had done for Bourassa in 1970. Then, some 300 delegates-at-large from the establishment ridings of Outremont, Westmount, Jean Talon, and Louis Hébert in Quebec, had voted en bloc for Bourassa, ensuring his first ballot margin of victory over Claude Wagner and Pierre Laporte. Wagner would later claim, with considerable justification, that the convention had been rigged against him. A very sore loser that January day, he practically had to be dragged to the podium. Paul Desrochers was much on Ryan’s mind in November. Known as Bourassa’s chief political fixer, Desrochers had left the former premier’s service, as he liked to say, “on April 1, 1974,” to take a job as a vicepresident of Canada Permanent Trust, and claimed he had not been active in politics since then. While it was true that Desrochers had for the most part sat out of the 1976 debacle, he remained a figure of mythic proportions within the party, widely admired and not a little feared. Appointed chief organizer by Lesage after the 1966 defeat, the first thing Desrochers did was go off to the United States to see how the Kennedy and Rockefeller organizations ran modern-day elections. In addition to cultivating these sophisticated marketing techniques, Desrochers developed and maintained his own network to keep him informed of the mood of the province. Desrochers’ eyes and ears across Quebec were insurance salesmen, brewery representatives, and his fellow members of the Knights of Columbus, the arch-conservative, lay Catholic organization. Gradually, Desrochers developed a profile for the man who would eventually succeed Lesage. Quebecers wanted young leadership for the 1970s, and they wanted an economic manager at the helm. Et voilà, Robert Bourassa, only thirty-six when he was elected Liberal leader and later premier in 1970, a lawyer and economist, trained at Harvard and Oxford. By the fall of 1977 it was no longer true, if it ever had been, that Desrochers was inactive within the party. Because of an old war wound

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that chronically bothered his back, Desrochers slept very little, and was usually at his desk in Montreal long before most people got out of bed. Constantly on the telephone, he had stayed in touch with the organizers whom he had brought along and installed in the Lesage and Bourassa years, and who were still in place in Montreal and across the province. And what he was hearing from them now was that something must be done. On the last weekend in October, Desrochers gathered a few dozen of his faithful protégés together at the Dauphin Motel in Drummondville, midway between Montreal and Quebec. They talked, in a general way, about where the party should turn next. The Saturday meeting was really nothing more than a serious bull session. But though quite inconclusive, it was dramatic evidence of Desrocher’s continuing influence within the party. And it was this wing of the party, the organizers as opposed to elite groups like Casgrain’s, that made Ryan extremely nervous. He simply did not think he could prevail at a convention where the party professionals opposed him at Desrochers’s bidding. And Desrochers’s leadership preference, if he had one, was a mystery to Ryan. This played on the profoundly suspicious side of Ryan’s nature. He was spooked, as one of his prominent supporters, Claude Forget, would recall, “about the obscure, unknown and unpredictable forces.” As all his supporters would eventually learn in one way or another, Ryan did not give his trust easily, and he was not the type to put himself in the hands of anyone. “I was not sure of the party at all,” Ryan said later. “I knew little about its structure. I knew little about the real people of influence in the party. I had my own impressions but I could not take them for very sure things, you know. “So I think that my decision was probably influenced by the uncertainty in which I was about the state of the party, about what I could expect from it. I kept hearing organizers were extremely important and I did not want to become a thing in their hands. And I think I was repelled by that unconsciously.” And so it would be “No” to his seeking the Liberal leadership. Before putting out his statement, Ryan informed prominent supporters like Casgrain that the circumstances just weren’t right. There was numbing disappointment and shock among Liberal activists who had built the November meeting around him. “After that,” said Casgrain, “it was far from sure that he would even be invited. Lots of guys were mad as hell.” Ryan himself offered to withdraw as keynote speaker to spare the party the embarrassment of his presence. But convention chairman Michel Robert insisted he appear anyway.

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When some 2,000 Quebec Liberals gathered at Montreal’s Bonaventure Hotel on the evening of Friday, November 18, the party managers were in something of a daze. It was one year and three days after the defeat. Time to begin the long march back. But they still hadn’t found a leader to take them down the road. With Ryan out of the leadership picture, the so-called Outremont Mafia turned their attention to the race for the party presidency. Their strategy was a simple one – to turn the convention into a holding operation to ensure that the party was not delivered into the hands of anyone else while the establishment resumed its search for a savior. In the week before the convention, it appeared likely that the presidency would be won by a Quebec City marketing specialist, a longtime party activist named Guy Morin. He was a close friend and unwavering supporter of Raymond Garneau, the former finance minister who was regarded as the prospective leadership candidate of the old guard. The implications of Morin winning the presidency were all too obvious to the Montreal-based establishment crowd. For one thing, Morin would be able to control arrangements for the leadership convention, and could deliver the party into the hands of the old guard. For another, the Quebec City wing would take control of the party. It was too much. The Outremont crowd were determined to stop it. And so, late in the game, they invented a man named Lawrence Wilson. It didn’t matter that hardly anyone in the party knew Larry Wilson, a wealthy Outremont attorney who had been active before the 1976 election on the Liberal party’s legal commission. He was the establishment candidate, and everyone was soon made to know it. The gang of four “executive assistants,” who had attended the Casgrain evenings, now swung into action with all deliberate speed. With Richard Mongeau masterminding the operation, Charles Bélanger ghosted an article for Wilson that appeared on Le Devoir’s “Ideas” page on the eve of the convention. Mongeau also called in his brother, Jean-Pierre, and together they collected a lot of political debts. “I had a lot of ious in my pocket,” Jean-Pierre Mongeau said. “And I took them out and cashed them and I wasn’t the only one.” It was pure political hardball, an awesome display. As the delegates swept down the escalator to the convention hall, they would be met by one or the other of the two Mongeau brothers. They and their operatives reminded delegates that Wilson was a wealthy lawyer who wouldn’t accept the $30,000 salary that went with the president’s job. He would work for free. As a lawyer, which Morin was not, Wilson would be able to administer the financial affairs of the party. Finally, and most of all, he was against Garneau.

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Wilson was shown around the convention hospitality suites by an organizer named Georges Boudreault, one of the most popular figures in the party. When the Liberals were in power, Boudreault had a licence-bureau concession in Montreal, and he favored his fellow organizers with small but important favors like low-numbered licence plates that impressed people in the neighborhood at the riding level. Moreover, he was a streetfighter. His territory was the tough East End of Montreal, the pq heartland where Boudreault had to fight for every vote, even in the Bourassa sweep of 1973. But Boudreault was no mere political hack. He favored a renewal in the party and was an important link between the establishment and the rank and file. With his thatch of prematurely grey hair, habitual smile and ever-present Tiparillo cirgar, Boudreault was instantly recognized everywhere on the floor. With Boudreault escorting him around the convention, Wilson didn’t put a foot wrong. Guy Morin never had a chance. The success of the Wilson campaign ensured that the pro-renewal wing in Montreal would keep control of the party for its own candidate. Perhaps Claude Forget or Claude Castonguay. Perhaps Michel Robert, if he made a big impression as convention chairman. Perhaps even Claude Ryan, if the Liberal party could yet persuade him to change his mind. Ryan’s mind was quite made up. But he may have felt a twinge of regret as he stood off to one side of the hotel escalator on that Saturday morning. What he was hearing from delegates as they streamed into the convention was not that they resented his decision, but that they regretted it. This was the sentiment wherever Ryan went in the day-long policy workshops. But it was nothing compared with the reception the Liberals had in store for him later on.

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4 Draft Ryan

It was as if they were determined to change his mind for him. When Ryan was introduced to the convention on Saturday evening, he was engulfed in a wave of applause, a whistling, cheering, footstomping ovation that went on for three full minutes that altered the course of Ryan’s life. Long afterwards, Ryan would wonder if it had been spontaneous or laid on. “It was spontaneous,” said Jean-Pierre Mongeau, “but if it hadn’t been we would have arranged it.” There was no claque as such. But a lot of people in the audience may have had the same idea as Philippe Casgrain. “Let’s keep it going,” he said to Jean-Pierre Ouellet as the ovation began to tape off. “Maybe we can make him change his mind.” It was certainly enough to set him thinking again. He was vain enough to be flattered, emotional enough to be moved, insecure enough to be shaken. The acclaim was quite authentic. It was an invitation to lead. And afterward, everyone, including Ryan, thought it was an important turning point. After that, it didn’t matter much what he said, and it didn’t matter how he said it. The delivery of the speech was, for Ryan, routinely soporific. He wore his heavy glasses and bowed his head to the text he had written up in an hour or so during the afternoon. It would be known later as the Third Option speech, mapping out a middle road that Quebec federalists were seeking between independence and the status quo. Ryan suggested the country could be reorganized into five regions: Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies

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and British Columbia. He was more or less thinking out loud of a way the constituent parts of the federation could be regrouped into roughly coequal regions for a better functioning of the whole. It was Ryan’s contention this would put each part of Canada on a stronger footing in dealing with Ottawa. Among reporters, the speech would be remembered for Ryan’s “Five Canadas,” a notion which he threw up as a talking point and discarded the moment he became a serious politician. Nothing was ever heard of it again. It didn’t matter to the Liberals that on this main point, Ryan was talking about something that sounded very neat in theory but was unattainable in practice, without first consulting the people of five provinces that would be wiped off the map, to say nothing of the five governments and premiers who would be put out of work. For the delegates, what mattered was that Ryan had devoted a career to thinking about constitutional reform. He had both civitas and gravitas, a sense of public spiritedness and unmistakable substance. And he left them on a note whose emotive quality could not be ruined even by his monotonous delivery. “No matter what the results are, after the referendum we will have to go on living together,” he said to the hushed audience, who knew the importance of what he was saying from the divisions they were experiencing even then in their everyday lives. “This very perspective,” he concluded, “should lead us to conduct the struggle with utmost dignity, respect for facts and for the opponents’ dignity; it is a struggle that promises to be the hardest and harshest in our history.” He sat down to another standing ovation. Madeleine Ryan, who rarely went to hear her husband speak, was in the audience that night because she “wanted to see what it was, the Liberal party.” The applause hadn’t subsided when people who knew her, knew the discreet but profound influence she exercised on her husband, began lobbying with her to change his mind. “He’s the man we need,” Pierre Mercier told her, entering a plea that rested on the immense ovation. “Yes, but they’re all Liberals,” Madeleine Ryan replied, apparently unimpressed. “Yes,” Mercier conceded, “but a standing ovation.” Ryan himself heard the same thing as delegates buttonholed him on his way out of the hall. “After all that’s happened here today,” Boudreault told him, “that standing ovation; can you still refuse to be leader of the party?” “Come and see me next week.” Ryan replied as he went on his way.

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The senior people in the abortive draft of Ryan caucused right there on the floor. “We’ve got to start up with Ryan again,” Casgrain remembers one of them saying. And so they would. Only this time, when he challenged them about their ability to deliver, they would have answers ready for him. “If we want to have Ryan,” Gilles Hébert told a group of like-minded Liberals that weekend, “we’ll have to prove to him that we can deliver, because with Ryan you have to do your homework; you have to prove to him that you’re right.” First of all, as Claude Forget said, they “realized they needed someone to open the door again.” Forget, as a prominent member of the parliamentary wing, and Hébert as a member of the party establishment, went to Ryan’s home on Monday evening for a meeting that ran well past midnight. Ryan lived in Outremont now. But he was not of Outremont. He had grown up in the underprivileged East End of Montreal and lived for nearly the first ten years of his marriage as a tenant in a very ordinary flat in East-Central Montreal, near the Gilford Street headquarters of the party he would one day lead. Even now that he lived in Outremont, where the intelligentsia rubbed shoulders uneasily with the bourgeoisie, he occasionally reminded people that he didn’t live “up there” on the northern slope of Mount Royal, with the likes of Bourassa and federal cabinet minster Jeanne Sauvé, or for that matter with Hébert and Mercier, two of his closest future advisors. No, Ryan lived “down below” in a modest duplex, just inside the Outremont line from Montreal, only a block away from polyglot Park Avenue. And it was true. Ryan’s house was sparely furnished. The carpets were threadbare. But it was his house, nearly all paid for by now, with an upstairs tenant. The one room he cared about was his study, with its brown leather armchair, the desk piled high with papers, and the walls lined with books. It was here that he received a stream of visitors over the years. And it was here that he greeted Forget and Hébert at the end of a long day at the paper. Ryan’s visitors told him they wanted nothing more than the chance to put together an organization chart that would give some indication of his support at all levels of the party, all across the province. “We’ll make an organigramme,” Hébert said, “and we’ll be back to you within a week.” All they wanted was Ryan’s say-so and when they went away, well past midnight, they had it. By morning, George Boudreault was on the phone placing calls to people he knew across Quebec. “I called all 110 ridings,” he said later. “I called the man who was best at organizing, who was not necessari-

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ly the party’s organizer in the riding.” When Boudreault had obtained the commitments he wanted, he went to the home of Jacques Lamoureux, a young lawyer and chief organizer for André Ouellet in the federal riding of Papineau in East-Central Montreal. Lamoureux, who would become chief organizer of Ryan’s leadership campaign, was known for his outer calm and inner toughness. By 3:30 on Wednesday morning, they had the organigramme which demonstrated deep commitment for Ryan everywhere in Quebec. They had something for Hébert to show Ryan. “It was then,” as Lamoureux said, “that we began to structure the campaign.” With Ryan, as they learned, something had to be on paper as proof of its existence. The organigramme wasn’t just a lot of loose talk and promises. It was tangible evidence that there was support out there for him. Ryan was impressed. Privately, he agreed to reconsider. Meanwhile, he was playing out a demanding schedule of speaking engagements, and he was leading the league in standing ovations. In Quebec City, on the first Saturday of December, Ryan appeared as the keynote speaker at the founding meeting of the Pre-Referendum Committee, a fledgling coalition of federalist forces. There were fourteen organizations represented at the Château Frontenac, from the powerful federal Liberals to the right-wing fringe of the provincial Créditistes. There was no way for the Pre-Referendum Committee to fly as it was structured, with every party and unity group having a theoretically equal say of two votes under the umbrella. It was bound, in retrospect, to fail. But it was Créditiste Camil Samson, a gifted stump speaker who spoke in similes and metaphors, who summarized the commonly held hopes of that founding meeting. “When the house is on fire,” he said, “it’s not the time to fight over the choice of colors of the firemen’s uniforms.” But Ryan was the principal attraction. As he rose to address the closing luncheon in the Château ballroom, he received another standing ovation. The job of the federalist forces, he said, was very simple. They had to find a way of turning a “No” at the referendum into a “Yes” for renewed federalism. That would be quite a feat, and the founders of the umbrella committee thought Ryan would make an ideal chairman. In Montreal a few days later, some of them took him to lunch and offered him the job. For a time, Ryan was sorely tempted, torn now between the prospect of becoming Liberal leader and head of the federalist forces, a nonpartisan position. It was Jacques Lamoureux who presented the most compelling arguments for the Liberal leadership. “What good does it do to win the referendum,” he asked Ryan, “if there is no one there to win the next

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election?” Ryan also knew that according to Bill 92, the enabling legislation for the referendum recently enacted by the Lévesque government, there would only be one official umbrella committee when the time came, controlled and directed by the leader of the opposition: that is to say, by the leader of the Quebec Liberal party. It did not take Ryan very long to discard the option of leading the Pre-Referendum Committee outside the National Assembly. If he became Liberal leader, it would have to do his bidding anyway. By mid-December, the news media had the story that Ryan was beginning a second period of reflection. He wasn’t reflecting so much as consulting with everyone around him. Ryan was now completely preoccupied with the leadership question and the tension rubbed off on his colleagues at Le Devoir. But there were moments of black humor. At one point, Ryan showed a list of his supporters to his political columnist, Pierre O’Neill, who had worked for the Liberal party in the 1960s and had followed Lévesque into the independence movement as his press secretary for a time before joining Le Devoir. O’Neill knew the Liberal party inside out, and he knew most of the names on the list. “Mr. Ryan,” said O’Neill, a sombre man with a permanent expression of brooding, “you’re surrounded by a gang of crooks.” But Ryan’s most serious consultations were with his wife and his two brothers. On a mid-December Sunday morning, the four of them met in Mayor Ryan’s City Hall office in Montreal North. All the brothers later agreed it was an important meeting. For two hours, Ryan reviewed his options and prospects with the three people he trusted most in the world, perhaps the only people he truly trusted. “He made up his mind in excess of 50 percent at that meeting,” Judge Gerald Ryan said later. “He consulted us because he knew he would get an honest gut reaction from us.” And Gerry Ryan noticed a change in Claude since he had last discussed the matter with him prior to the November policy convention of the Liberal party. “Before the November gathering, he put the emphasis on the negative factors,” the judge said. “It’s my conclusion that the reception he got in November plus renewed pressure from private sources led him to reconsider. I got the impression, and I think Yves did after that meeting, that he would go. But there was certainly no decision reached.” By now, the two brothers agreed that Claude should try for the leadership. It was the judge’s view, as Claude recalled it, “that after fifteen years with Le Devoir I had made my contribution there and might have another contribution to make in another field.” As for the mayor, a down-to-earth politician with his own network of contacts at the municipal level, he had changed his assessment of the situation and

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was now urging his brother to run. “You must go, you must,” he said, as Claude recalled it. “I’ve gathered impressions and reactions and it’s quite contrary to what I expected.” As it became evident that Ryan really might change his mind, there were many who wondered if he hadn’t merely been testing the wind with his negative decision in early November. Some people who worked with him always thought so. But those who were closest to him never believed it. “That wouldn’t have been entirely strange,” said Michel Roy, “but the man wasn’t as calculating as that. I think he thought after speaking with his wife, who was his principal adviser, and his two brothers, that it would be better not to go.” “He was happy where he was,” said Madeleine Ryan. “He loved his work at Le Devoir. Then it was a big decision for him to take at the age our children were at.” The five Ryan kids, then aged 10 to 18, were dead against their father’s prospective entry into politics. By Christmas, Ryan was finally moving towards an irreversible decision to seek the leadership. On December 27, Lucette St. Amant had a party for Ryan to which she invited the two dozen people who would form the core group of his campaign. Ryan kept insisting that there were problems. “We need a chief organizer,” he said. Jacques Lamoureux was there. “We haven’t got a financial chairman,” Ryan said. Gilles Hébert agreed to take it on. “That meeting was decisive,” Ryan allowed later, “because they had made their own surveys with responsible people in the party. They felt we had a very strong chance of winning the convention if I made the decision to run.” When Ryan went home that night, the main elements of his campaign organization had apparently fallen into place. Even his fears about Paul Desrochers were allayed over the Christmas season when the former chief organizer visited Ryan and assured him that he would do nothing to thwart him, that indeed he would quietly support him. Desrochers had taken thorough soundings of his own. At a second meeting of his friends at the Dorval Hilton on December 10, some 200 organizers cast a straw poll, in the form of a secret ballot, for the party’s next leader. Desrochers had put five names on the ballot: Ryan, Jean Drapeau, Jean Chrétien, Raymond Garneau and Gérard D. Lévesque. Georges Boudreault, who counted the ballots, later said that Ryan beat everyone else combined by a 2 to 1 margin. Desrochers also was aware of a preferential poll of delegates to the November convention after Ryan’s speech, and that he was the overwhelming choice. Whatever Desrochers might think of Ryan, he was no fool. The director of Le Devoir was the clear consensus choice of the party. In mid-December,

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Desrochers called on Mercier and Hébert to assure them that he would play no role in the convention. “Paul was for Ryan,” Mercier said, “and he understood that he had to be on the outside, but he suffered from it.” Ryan spent New Year’s with his in-laws at Lévis, across the river from Quebec. He consulted with old friends like caucus member Julien Giasson, a comrade from the Catholic Action days who agreed to serve as chief organizer for the eastern half of the province. Back in Montreal after the holiday, Ryan went ahead with a final organizational meeting that had been scheduled for January 4. But before meeting with his supporters that Wednesday evening, he sat down at the manual typewriter in his office. What he turned out in the next hour ran to his usual length of five or six pages double-spaced. And he wrote in his accustomed style, numbering all the points he wished to make. But it would not appear on the editorial page of the next day’s paper. Instead, Ryan would read the text aloud to his assembled campaign team. To the two dozen people gathered at Montreal’s Richelieu Hotel, it sounded rather like an ultimatum. In fact, it was. Ryan was posting what would later be known as the seven conditions of his candidacy. “The organization of this campaign must not,” Ryan recited, “be infiltrated, influenced, controlled or intimidated by any outside forces.” He was thinking, though he did not name him, of Paul Desrochers, as he made clear a bit further on. “We don’t need any kingmaker, and we must refuse any interference by those who would play such a role.” He went on to enjoin his supporters to refrain from “any dishonest methods, anything illegal, any intellectual trickery.” He wanted a guarantee from his financial committee that it would not accept corporate donations, and so conform to the spirit of the Lévesque government’s financing law which outlawed such donations and placed a $3,000 ceiling on individual donations. Though the law applied only to elections, leaving parties to manage internal affairs like a leadership campaign as they saw fit, Ryan wanted to comply with it anyway. He didn’t want the pq saying he was a creation of the bagmen and a creature of the corporate fatcats. Furthermore, during the three-month leadership campaign, the organization would have to pay him the equivalent of his salary at Le Devoir. Moreover, in the event of losing the convention, he demanded the equivalent of his salary for a three to six-month period while he found other work, since going back to the paper was out of the question. Nobody was shocked by this condition, which everyone in the room thought eminently reasonable. What struck them as odd was the

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fact that Ryan insisted on putting it up front, and making such a big deal of it. What no one present could understand at all was Ryan’s drawn out shouting match with André Raynauld, the member for Outremont and former Economic Council of Canada chairman, over the economic resolution adopted at the November policy meeting. Among his seven conditions, Ryan said he would not be bound by the free enterprise resolution that called for a substantially reduced government role in the economy. The resolution had been Raynauld’s baby. More to the point, perhaps, Raynauld had only recently decided that he would not himself be a leadership candidate, and Ryan may have wanted to test his loyalty. It was, as Ryan himself remembered it, “a tough exchange.” It was more than that. For Ryan’s supporters, it was puzzling. For Raynauld it was humiliating. “I had the impression,” Raynauld said later, “that he wanted me completely on my knees. He spent a good part of the evening saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to run because of a divergence of opinion with me.” Ryan’s insistence that the party recognize the realities of a mixed economy was taken as a matter of course. It was the last thing on anyone’s mind. But Raynauld, a certified intellectual who was not in the least intimidated by Ryan, said it was common knowledge he had a hand in writing the economic resolutions, and that he could not remain silent if Ryan insisted on attacking it. “But these aren’t differences,” Raynauld told him, “just slogans. I’ll be loyal.” Years later, Raynauld would vividly recall this memorable dustup. “I found it very disagreeable,” he said after leaving politics in 1980, “and a bit crazy for him to behave like that.” It wasn’t, as Raynauld said, enough to make him change loyalties in the leadership campaign, but he never forgave Ryan for the humiliation. No one else who was there ever understood it, or forgot Ryan’s adamant mood on the evening of the seven conditions. Even one of his own brothers, when he heard about it, was a bit taken aback. “Jesus Christ, you’ve got a lot of nerve,” Gerry Ryan told him. “Don’t humiliate them by telling them what they must accept.” But accept the conditions they did. Even so, over the final weekend, before his scheduled announcement, Ryan wavered again. And for most of the weekend, it seemed he wouldn’t run. “He was,” said Pierre Mercier, “a bit like a patient the night before his operation.” But there was more to it than pre-op jitters. On January 6, Paul Desrochers bumped into Brian Mulroney after a leisurely Friday lunch at the Beaver Cub, the Montreal restaurant where senior executives went to be seen.

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Mulroney, whom Ryan had enthusiastically supported for the Progessive Conservative leadership in 1976, was a longtime friend of the newspaper publisher. Though many years younger – Mulroney was then only 38 – the lantern-jawed Irishman from Baie Comeau had made it his business to know Ryan from his first days as a Tory activist. Mulroney had a hand in recruiting Yves Ryan as an unsuccessful Conservative candidate in the Trudeaumania sweep of 1968. He remembered standing with Claude Ryan on the edge of a hysterical crowd of 40,000 who greeted Trudeau on the plaza at Place Ville Marie during the spring campaign of 1968. Since Ryan was endorsing Tory leader Robert Stanfield, the two men agreed, as Mulroney recalled, “that this was a very deplorable turn of events, and we immediately adjourned for a long lunch.” After Ryan began to reconsider in December, he asked Mulroney for a list of do’s and don’ts in the running of a leadership campaign. Mulroney, who still bore the marks and the bitterness of his defeat at the Conservative convention, drew up a fourteen-point handwritten memorandum that Ryan carried around in his pocket for weeks afterwards. Whether Desrochers knew of Mulroney’s friendship with Ryan, whether he wanted the exchange to get back to him, was not known. It’s also possible Desrochers was just talking out his hurt at being a kingmaker without a king to crown. Mulroney thought he was talking straight. He was certainly talking tough. Desrochers denounced Ryan in the most categorical terms, and said there were many people in the party who didn’t want it taken over by him. He thought Jean Chrétien might be the man to stop him. In any event, he left Mulroney with the clear impression that he would do anything to stop Ryan. After he left Desrochers, Mulroney urgently phoned Ryan and asked to see him immediately at Le Parrain et La Marraine, a restaurant on Notre Dame Street up from Le Devoir. “Who’s Desrochers supporting?” Mulroney asked. “He’s supporting me,” replied Ryan, explaining that “Mon Oncle Paul,” as he was known with varying degrees of affection, had been to see him a few days before. “He’s got a funny way of showing it,” said Mulroney, detailing his conversation with Desrochers. “You’re having lunch at the wrong place, Claude. This is the big league now. The boys play rough. They’re going to cut your throat.” Ryan was shocked. He went back to the newspaper and told Michel Roy he wasn’t running. Roy who remembered the incident clearly as Le Coup Mulroney, said Ryan was “very upset, very agitated. Mulroney had told him, “Watch out, Paul D. has sworn you won’t be leader.”

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“I remember,” said Roy, “he was almost worn out, intellectually, morally, physically.” Ryan himself later acknowledged that he “wavered for about fortyeight hours,” after his Friday afternoon meeting with Mulroney. “Brian had presented to me a very dark picture of all the prospects,” he said. “It kept striking me that I probably could not overcome all those forces which were strongly entrenched in the party. It may have been a very illusory thought that some people had tried to develop in me.” Whatever, Ryan was a wild man, almost paranoid, that weekend. Since many of his own prospective advisers had been raised in politics by Desrochers, Ryan saw himself surrounded by enemies. Jacques Lamoureux, who had been a protégé of Desrochers, bore much of Ryan’s suspicious wrath. Ryan thought he might be some kind of political mole who had been placed in the Ryan camp by Desrochers. Lamoureux quit on the spot after a very tough conversation with Ryan on Saturday night. It was Lucette St. Amant who finally talked some sense into Ryan. “If you want to play into Desrochers’ hands,” she told him, “you’re going about it the right way if you let him scare you out.” The next day, Ryan patched it up with Lamoureux. But it was still far from certain that Ryan was running. There was still one more meeting over that Epiphany weekend at Ryan’s house with his wife, his brothers and his 79-year-old mother, Blandine Ryan. They agreed that Ryan should go, but only if his conditions were met. And on Sunday evening, he gathered his political advisers for one final run-through at his house. Hébert and Mercier were there with Boudreault. Julien Giasson had come down from Quebec. Claude Forget was in touch from his chalet in the Laurentians, although he did not come down to the city. “By that time I had grown a bit weary,” he said, “not of fighting opponents, but of fighting him.” Ryan’s advisers still had a fight on their hands. “I’m not going,” Ryan told them, “our organization isn’t strong enough, we have no money.” For three hours, they took him through it again. Finally, he agreed that he would go. When he came out of his study, his children were waiting for him. “What’s the decision?” one of them asked. “It’s yes,” their father replied. In the living room, Denys Pelletier was also waiting for Ryan’s decision. A Montreal notary and son of Le Devoir’s second director, Georges Pelletier, he was president of L’Imprimerie Populaire, the trust that administered the newspaper.

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When he had spoken with Ryan a few hours before, Pelletier had the strong impression that he would not run. Now Pelletier knew from the faces of the smiling party activists that “he had either changed his mind or had his conditions fulfilled.” Ryan introduced his advisors to Pelletier, who was a stranger to most of them. “I want you,” Ryan said to them, “to meet my former boss.” And so he had done it, at last.

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5 Insider, Outsider

From the beginning, it was a case of insider versus outsider, only the outsider was the insider, and the insider was the outsider. If ever the Liberal party of Quebec owed its leadership to one man, that man was Raymond Garneau. Though he was then only forty-three years old, Garneau had spent all his working life in the Liberal party. He had risen through the ranks, from assistant director of its Quebec office, to economic research in Premier Lesage’s office, to chief of staff when Lesage was opposition leader after the 1966 defeat. In 1970, Garneau had run for the new Bourassa team in the Quebec City riding of Jean Talon, a historic Liberal seat whose voters expected their member to be in the cabinet. They were not disappointed, as Garneau first became a 35-year-old minister of state and then a 36-year-old minister of finance. Nor did they have any reason to be disappointed in his performance. In the 1973 election, Garneau played a starring role, demolishing the pq’s economic spokesman, Jacques Parizeau, and his “Budget of the Year One,” of independence. Because he was young and attractive, Garneau was one of the few members of the administration welcome on campus in those days when most students were ardent Péquistes. His star rose so high during the second Bourassa government that he became known as le Dauphin. As the premier’s popularity plummeted, Garneau’s stock rose. Though he loyally refused to be a party to any intrigues, there was talk of him succeeding Bourassa before the next election. For a time, Garneau even shouldered a double load as minister of education for a few months in 1975 after the precipitous resignation of

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the moody Jérôme Choquette. Being minister of education at any time in Quebec is a thankless task. Being minister responsible for implementing Bill 22 in the schools, as the education provisions in the language act came on stream, was a heavy burden for Garneau to carry, in addition to the routinely onerous finance portfolio at a time of heavy deficit-spending to finance the Olympic Games. But Garneau did whatever the premier asked. And he went wherever the party asked, even to campuses, in the bleak campaign of 1976. When the Liberals left office, no survivor of the debacle had more accumulated credits than Raymond Garneau. He was young but experienced, loyal and talented. No one had a more legitimate claim on the leadership. He never had a chance. For many Liberal activists, including some who may have considered Garneau the obvious successor to Bourassa when the party was in power, the choice of a new leader was dictated by the circumstances in which the party found itself. Once the heir apparent, Garneau was associated with an exiled and discredited regime. Since he had the misfortune as finance minister to have responsibility for the liquor board and the provincial lottery, he was tainted by association with a couple of minor scandals. And he was still young, even baby-faced, at a time when the party was trying to project an image of experience, which he had in abundance. Garneau was a man without important enemies in the party. But more important, in the Liberal leadership race, he was a man without important allies. For many Liberals it was an affair contre-coeur, against their own hearts, against their own better natures, and for some of them eventually against their better judgment. They thought it took someone like Ryan to win the referendum. And they told Garneau, in words that rained on his heart. “Raymond,” Georges Boudreault had told him during the November policy convention, “I would love to be with you, but I can’t. We need a renewal.” Garneau was hearing the same thing from establishment figures of the party who bluntly assessed his prospects. “You’re a dead duck,” Pierre Mercier had told him. Within practically every influential quarter of the party, he was rudely rebuffed. “They’d say, we like you,” he recalled without a trace of bitterness years later when he had become president of the Montreal City and District Savings Bank. “Then they’d say, you’d do a good job as premier, but to win the referendum we need Ryan. That’s what they’d tell me. I would answer, and I think my analysis was factual,

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that neither Ryan nor Garneau would win the referendum, but the cause, that in any event it would be an amalgamation of opposition forces.” And so the party’s power brokers lined up against him, even though, of all the prospective candidates, Garneau was the one who spoke out of conviction for their interests. He was for individual rights as opposed to the collectivist vision of the pq, a free-enterprising economist opposed to the interventionist policies of the new government, a staunch and strong federalist who made no apologies for saying as he always did that “Quebec is my home, but Canada is my country.” Yet they stood against him; the elites, the bourgeoisie, the English, and the minority ethnic groups stood with a man who had endorsed the pq in 1976. They were not looking for a candidate, as Garneau observed, “they were looking for a savior.” Most damaging to Garneau’s hopes was the active opposition of the Liberal establishment. He couldn’t define it with any precision, but he knew who comprised it. “The establishment in any party is a moving concept,” he later observed, “because it’s not always the same people. But they’re always found in groups that play a leadership role.” That’s why, he said, you found the establishment in ridings like Louis Hébert in Quebec, and Outremont and Westmount in Montreal. “They are people who are very active, first of all,” he said. “They have important jobs, they are interviewed on radio and television, they are invited to answer questions by the media. And, well that’s the establishment, and they can build roads because of the access they have to public opinion.” Then why, with everything he had going against him, did Garneau run? “I have no choice,” he told his friend Jean Chrétien in December of 1977. “I have to run because if I don’t they’ll say I have something to hide.” Garneau was then referring to recurrent allegations that he was somehow mixed up in a patronage scandal. The veil of doubt was finally lifted from Garneau’s head just before Christmas, when Lévesque’s justice minister, Marc-André Bédard, formally and publicly absolved him of any wrongdoing during the Bourassa era. And then, he really had no choice but to run, since he had nothing to hide. Damned if he didn’t, Garneau was certainly damned if he did. He knew from the outset that it would be “very, very tough” for him, even if Ryan didn’t come in. Garneau knew a campaign would cost money, a lot of money, even though “we had none at the beginning of the campaign.” By some kind of perverse symbolism, he rented a big storefront office on the ground

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floor of Place Dupuis, a spanking new office tower housing the Dupuis Frères department store that would go bankrupt later in 1978. He was not entirely without friends. Victor Goldbloom, who had been Bourassa’s municipal affairs minister, was with him, but he could not deliver much support in the Jewish community. Paul Berthiaume, an able young cabinet minister who was defeated in 1976, served as campaign chairman. It was Berthiaume who introduced Garneau to the Montreal news media when he announced his candidacy on the stormy afternoon of Monday, January 9. The sleet and snow closed the road from Quebec to Montreal, preventing some of his supporters in the capital from coming for the news conference. Still, as he announced his candidacy, it was a proud moment for le p’tit gars de Plessisville, who had come a long way in life from his Eastern Township village, to the University of Geneva where he obtained his master’s degree, to membership in the provincial cabinet. Now he sought to lead the federalist alliance in the referendum, and he hoped someday to become premier of Quebec. His hopes would rise no higher. At that moment, only a mile or so away in Old Montreal, Claude Ryan was clearing out at Le Devoir. On his last full day at the paper there was little time for reminiscing and no hint of regret at the prospect of his crossing the floor, in a sense, of his leaving journalism to enter politics. If anything, now that the agonizing was finally behind him, Ryan was serene. When Le Devoir’s board of directors convened to receive his resignation, they also wanted his opinion on the succession. That was something they would have to work out on their own, Ryan told them. He had run the paper from stem to stern for more than a decade. Now it was their ship. He was not the type to waste much time in sentimentalizing over his departure. “Pain,” as Michel Roy observed, “passes very quickly for him.” He had reserved the right in his letter of resignation only to publish one final editorial in which he could “take leave of the readers of Le Devoir.” It was left to Roy to express the paper’s gratitude to Ryan in an extraordinarily warm and well written tribute. “He not only served the institution,” wrote the editor-in-chief, “in fifteen years he gave everything he had to this paper: his time, his health, all his intellectual resources, his passion.” Comparing Ryan with the paper’s illustrious founder, Henri Bourassa, Roy asserted that “none was greater than Bourassa, but Ryan was the greatest of his successors.” For Ryan, there was nothing more to do at Le Devoir but bid farewell to his staff and be on his way. On January 10, a horde of reporters and a claque of supporters crowded into a salon of the Hotel Meridien to hear Ryan announce his

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candidacy. “Having given the matter serious consideration,” he began, “I’ve decided I must put aside a career I was very attached to, right up to the end, and immerse myself in politics.” Explaining the reasons for the reversal of his “irrevocable” decision of only two months before to stay out of politics, Ryan said he was now convinced of the Liberal party’s need for a leader of “new faith, familiar with the realities of the milieu, known for his reputation for integrity, and respected by his fellow citizens.” Typically, it wasn’t a very modest advertisement for himself, but it was a fair summary of how the voters regarded the prospect of his candidacy. For Ryan felt he was responding to a very genuine draft, not just by the managers of the Liberal party, but by the electorate at large. By the likes of the bus driver who had taken him downtown the previous day, and the cabbie who drove him to a television interview earlier that afternoon. Wherever he went by now, his angular face was recognized. Though he was known as an intellectual, he had an easy and genuine rapport with ordinary working people. His reception on the street, he said later, “was stronger than I anticipated because I had never expected that much from the public at large. I knew I was respected. But I never expected this sort of moral draft to occur. And it was really that. You should have seen the reactions in those days.” Filing out of Ryan’s press conference, some reporters noticed something on his first campaign poster. Alongside a broadly smiling Ryan, there was a long quotation he had found in Arnold Toynbee’s last book, Choose Life. “If a democratic regime is to function satisfactorily,” the political philosopher had written near the end of his life, “it needs a leader who is neither a trickster nor a demagogue, but a person of such ethical and intellectual worth that his fellow citizens will follow his lead without having to be either coerced or emotionally excited. Such a leader may be hard to find and, if found, may be reluctant to undertake the difficult and thankless task of guiding his fellow citizens. The leader’s role is obviously of the greatest social importance; to undertake it for altruistic reasons requires a very high degree of public spirit and unselfishness.” It occurred then and there to some people covering Ryan that he really was going to be different from other politicians who devoted a great deal of their time to perfecting their thirty-second clips for television. There had never been anyone quite like him. Imagine, a politician quoting Toynbee on a campaign poster. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. That was how Ryan saw himself, answering a call. But there was a more apt description of him, though it had been written nearly three quarters of a century earlier about a prospective us presidential candi-

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date named Woodrow Wilson. “Certain personal attributes are essential to successful candidacy,” one George Harvey had written with the Princeton president in mind. “Known fidelity to high ideals. Unquestioned integrity. Veracity. Courage. Caution. Intellectuality. Wisdom. Experience. Achievement. Breadth of mind. Strength of body. Clarity of vision. Simplicity in manner of living. Eloquence. Human sympathy. Alertness. Optimism. Enthusiasm. Finally and practically: availability.” That was Ryan, right down to the ground. And now that he was available, he intended to run his own show, and he meant to score a smashing victory. “Right from the beginning,” chief organizer Jacques Lamoureux said later, “the idea was to win big, so as to minimize the divisions in the party afterwards.” “Some of my people had that philosophy,” Ryan acknowledged. “In those days,” said Lucette St. Amant, who ran the publicity side of the leadership campaign, “Ryan listened to only one person: Ryan.” Since he first considered running in mid-1977, Ryan had an obsessive concern with the financing of his campaign, and a need to know that the party establishment was behind him. These concerns merged in the choice of Hébert as his bagman and Bernard Langevin as his treasurer. Hébert’s father had been the Liberal fund raiser before him, just as Langevin’s father, Hector, had been the party treasurer. Hector Langevin had also been a director of Le Devoir. His son Bernard, a man of Ryan’s own generation, struck the candidate as reliable and trustworthy, as far as Ryan was willing to trust anyone with his campaign funds. “He followed it pretty closely,” Langevin said much later; “I was giving him a report every day, how much was coming in, what went out and where it went.” As Hébert and Pierre Mercier had known, and as Ryan could never have known, they had no difficulty in raising money for him. Ryan had been terribly afraid that he would finish the campaign with a huge deficit. He knew they would spend the $350,000 permitted by the party. But he couldn’t see how they could raise much more than $200,000. Even before entering the race, he obtained promises from his supporters that they would help shoulder an eventual deficit. “I had that pledge from that nucleus that we would share the responsibility for an eventual deficit,” he said, “and I was very, very comforted by that.” Once his fundraisers set to work, as he later acknowledged, “we were never worried again.” In their newly discovered enthusiasm for popular financing, Ryan’s people left no possibility to chance. Every Tuesday morning, they would hold a fundraising breakfast in a restaurant of the venerable Windsor Hotel. One week it was the women of

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the Jewish community, the next it was the needle trade, then it was the lawyers and so on through the list of Montreal communities and professions. On Ryan’s agenda, these were pencilled as “pdbs,” Petits Déjeuners Bénéfices, and he loved them because it was a way for him to meet community leaders in the metropolis. If anything, the Ryan campaign had more money than it could reasonably or legally spend, and much more than the candidate was willing to spend. In the end, according to Langevin’s statement on the leadership campaign, the Ryan campaign collected $529,863.26 and spent $422,793.59. This exceeded the party’s $350,000 limit, but included Ryan’s expenses and salary. In any event, there were no tag days for him afterwards, as his organization finished the campaign with a surplus of $106,899.67. As late as March 20, less than a month before the convention, the Ryan campaign had spent only $120,000 over the first two months. That was because of the frugal nature of the man. The campaign headquarters was a sparsely furnished walk-up on the ninth floor of the Valiquette furniture building at the corner of Berri and St. Catherine Streets, only a block away from Garneau’s highly visible storefront headquarters. Bernard Langevin owned Valiquette furniture and the building. He offered it free, and told Ryan he could pay a modest rent if he wanted. For Ryan, who had bought Le Devoir’s St. Sacrement Street headquarters for $65,000 cash, this smelled like a good deal. If the leadership was a two-horse race, Ryan insisted on being both thoroughbred and jockey, as well as owner and trainer. He was extremely difficult to manage and suspicious of political professionals. They would discover, as he later said, that “people who try to organize me are anathema to me.” As if to underline his determination to remain his own man, Ryan insisted on driving himself to most meetings within easy commuting distance of Montreal. Often, Madeleine would come along, as she said, because it was the only time they could be alone together for a talk. If he was exceptionally tired after a late meeting somewhere in the boondocks, he would let her drive home while he curled up in the back seat of their Chevy sedan. Finally, after a month, he permitted himself to be driven to an event in Drummondville. One of his supporters had insisted on sending a car for him. But he didn’t know his man very well. Ryan was both amused and horrified when he saw the car, a purple Lincoln Continental. After that, it was back to the Chevy. Ryan had his reasons, even though he was a terrible driver who represented a threat to himself and thus to the federalist forces in those pre-referendum days. For a man of his

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humble origins, a car was a certain symbol of success. By driving himself, he signalled his intention to retain his independence and not be changed by politics. Besides, a chauffeur would overhear his conversations with other passengers. It was not until the 1980 referendum campaign that Ryan finally accepted the government-issue limousine that was his due as opposition leader. And in the 1981 election, it was still a bit strange to see Ryan being driven off in his big Pontiac. “You’re getting used to the comforts,” teased his brother Gerry, who nevertheless predicted that when Claude’s time in politics was over, he wouldn’t miss the perks. So Ryan’s organizers were never quite sure when or how he might turn up at a meeting, and they soon got used to waiting for his Chevy to pull up to the front door of some place like the junior college campus in Hull where the party staged the first of nine all-candidates debates on January 15. There were only two candidates, and there would be only two if Ryan did his job properly. At this point, Chrétien was still ready to jump in if Ryan faltered badly in the first month. But it would have been very uphill for Chrétien. “I thought Chrétien in a battle against Ryan would have suffered the same result as Garneau,” said André Ouellet, the federal Liberal chief organizer in Quebec, who knew the terrain well and knew the resistance to the idea of a candidate from Ottawa. “The reaction was we need an outsider and Ryan symbolized a new beginning.” Chrétien, Ouellet concluded, “would have had to declare himself much earlier and resign as a minister and run not as Minister Chrétien but as Citizen Chrétien.” Chrétien’s other major problem as a prospective candidate was that, as Garneau put it, “his clientele was the same as mine.” Had Chrétien come in, he would have split his own vote with Garneau, while there was no other candidate of the establishment or youth wings of the party to divide Ryan’s potential clientele. For a time, there was a possibility that interim leader Gérard D. Lévesque might come in, primarily to add some interest to the race. Because he was so well liked, Lévesque might have attracted considerable support. But there were more important considerations in mind. “I know I can win the convention,” he had told fellow mna John Ciaccia during Ryan’s second period of reflection. “But can I win the province?” The consensus was that he couldn’t and Lévesque, who could usually be relied on to put the party’s interest ahead of his own, stayed clear of the leadership campaign. From the beginning then, it was a two-horse race, as it would remain to the end. For Ryan there were two challenges. First, he had

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to prove his capacity to perform under pressure in public. Second, he had to establish and maintain early momentum in the selection of delegates that would begin in late January and run through the end of March. The prospective all-candidates meetings turned into a series of RyanGarneau debates, easy to organize, easy to follow, easy to score. In the news media, coverage of the meetings became a continuous metaphor of the boxing ring, with Ryan ahead in the early rounds, Garneau on the ropes in the middle rounds, with some serious questions as to whether he would go the distance or throw in the towel. In fact, Garneau performed extremely well, demonstrating substance, a sense of history and a well-versed appreciation of the constitutional issue that was admittedly Ryan’s strong suit. But the perception of Garneau, as a nice but essentially shallow man, had already been formed. “The thing that insulted me the most in this campaign,” Garneau said later, “was that I passed for a man without ideas, while the other guy passed for an intellectual who would conceive a new society.” By the very nature of a two-man race, there was bound to be considerable bad feeling between the two candidates. But it ran much deeper than that. “If you read Ryan’s editorials over the years,” suggested Jean-Claude Rivest, a former Bourassa aide who was then chief of staff in the opposition leader’s office, “there weren’t many bouquets in there for Raymond, because he never consulted Ryan between ’70 and ’76. Ryan thought then that Raymond was too junior.” Rivest, who would succeed Garneau in his Quebec City riding of Jean Talon, thought that Ryan eventually came to recognize that Garneau was deeper than he had thought at the time. “Garneau was never a person with whom I got along very easily,” Ryan admitted long after the convention. “He’s not an intellectual. He’s a man who has grown from entirely different sources. His relations were mostly in Quebec and among the so-called professionals in the party. I could never get along with him easily. I never had a good conversation with him during the entire campaign, so I think we more or less grew apart as the campaign unfolded.” As the campaign progressed it got rough, as only Quebec politics can be, with each organization guilty of whispering campaigns about the opposing candidate. The Ryan campaign distributed a copy of an old newpaper article which asserted that Garneau had to be hospitalized for a minor nervous breakdown when he was finance minister in the Bourassa government. “Ask my colleagues if it’s true,” Garneau

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protested at a debate with Ryan in Rimouski at the end of February. Ryan apologized for his organization but, characteristically, not for himself. On the other side, Garneau’s telephone canvassers were working at one point from a “Perfect Salesman’s Kit,” a ridiculous catalogue of half-truths and distortions of many things Ryan had said or written over the years. While reminding Liberal activists of Ryan’s endorsement of the pq, the Garneau manual went on to claim that he was soft on separatism because René Lévesque had quoted some of his editorials in an early book. As for Ryan’s seven conditions, the Garneau sales kit alleged that “only mercenaries pose conditions.” Despite frequent reminders of Ryan’s position in 1976, his campaign for delegates went well from the beginning. Because it was a two-man race, the campaign translated itself at the riding level into the election of slates committed to one or the other candidate. Delegates would receive a list of the slates on their way into a hall and would vote accordingly. From the beginning, the Ryan forces were cleaning up. In some ridings, the score was 24 to 0 for Ryan. He even swept the riding of Louis Hébert, next door to Garneau’s own in his supposed fortress of Quebec. Before long, the party had a problem. Ryan was too strong. “At one point, most of the ridings were coming in about 4 to 1 in his favor,” said convention chairman Louis Rémillard. By mid-March, it was widely rumored in the party that Garneau would drop out of the race, and that only Gérard D. Lévesque had talked him into staying in. Both men vigorously denied it, “I didn’t even talk to any organizers about that because I didn’t want to discourage them,” Garneau later claimed. “They were enthusiastic and I couldn’t tell them that I myself had grave doubts. I was worried about coming out of it in debt, and I thought to myself of quitting because I knew I wasn’t winning and I wished it would be over. But it would have caused considerable damage to the Liberal party if I hadn’t persisted until the convention.” The way Ryan thought he heard it at the time, Garneau’s organization was demanding that the party assume his debts as a condition of his staying in until the end to provide a good show at the convention. “Ryan told me that,” said Michel Roy of Le Devoir, “and he told me that he obviously couldn’t do it.” “There was never any question of that,” Garneau said late in 1980. “I wouldn’t have accepted, either. I would have paid out of my pocket first.” In fact, Garneau ended the campaign with a $35,000 deficit, whereupon many of his friends, perhaps to assuage their guilt for hav-

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ing deserted him, rushed to cover his bills. He finished up with a $25,000 surplus and established a modest foundation for students. “It was probably the biggest consolation I had,” he said, “to see that pack of friends who supported me after the convention.” But at the convention itself, Garneau had only two chances. Slim, and none.

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6 Scarves and Balloons

It was the scarves that did it. It was the scarves, a sea of red Ryan scarves in the Quebec Coliseum, that told you for a certain fact that he had the numbers when it counted at the mid-April convention. It was the scarves, and Ryan’s joining in the waving of them, that told you he had come down from the ivory tower of his newspaper into the brawling main street of Quebec politics. The scarves had been Lucette St. Amant’s bright idea. On a Ryan organization chart, she should have been in charge of gadgets. It was Lucette who had chosen the campaign’s slogan, “Leadership.” Actually it was picked out from several possibilities by her teenage son one night in the basement of her split-level home in the comfortable L’Acadie section of North-End Montreal. In the single word, Leadership, several themes merged. For one thing, though it was an English word, it had become an accepted intrusion of franglais into the French political vernacular. Ryan himself had often referred in his editorials to the need for, or lack of, le leadership. Now he hoped to provide what he had so often called for, a kind of moral leadership. As a slogan, it suited him down to the ground. It also fit in with what the party was looking for in the leadership campaign. There was something rather bald-faced about the Garneau campaign slogan, which promised to take the party back to power, “le Pouvoir.” Somehow it suggested that power was the only thing the Liberals stood for. And there was more than a grain of truth to that. But Liberal activists did not want to be reminded of it in the

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midst of a leadership campaign that was supposed to be about a higher purpose. In Lucette’s gadget kit there was to be a minimum of gadgetry that smacked of old-style convention hoopla. The Ryan convention kit consisted of a shopping bag with a few stickers. The convention mementos that people would keep around in drawers were the scarves and a reporter’s notebook, complete with a history of the party and a crossword puzzle. The black notebook was Ryan’s personal trademark, and had quickly become identified as such to delegates all over the province. Wherever he went in the leadership campaign, Ryan was still inclined to whip one out of his back pocket and begin ticking off his hand-written notes. The scarves were another matter. They were clearly marked “Made in Japan.” Which was sure to offend Quebec’s struggling textile industry, not to mention the possibility of the press putting it out that Ryan had unilingual English scarves. St. Amant and a group of volunteers stayed up all through one night taking the labels off thousands and thousands of scarves. The only thing she didn’t have was balloons, and somebody wondered where they were. “I didn’t order any goddamn balloons,” she said. “I don’t want to see one goddamn balloon.” The Liberals had planned to spend a bundle, about $750,000 to stage an American-style convention spectacular at the Coliseum in Quebec, the house that Jean Béliveau built. But there were a couple of fundamental problems, namely making sure that they had an arena and that Garneau stayed in until convention time to keep up the appearance of democratic suspense. The problem with the Coliseum was one of logistics, and assuring that Quebec’s Nordiques, then of the old World Hockey Association, would not insist that the arena be reserved for their possible play-off dates in mid-April. This problem was rather easily resolved by the intervention of Jean Lesage. The patron of the Quiet Revolution, now a well-upholstered boardroom lawyer, also happened to be chairman of the board of the Nordiques. In effect, the party had their elder statesman make a phone call to himself. In any event, the problem of the Nordiques and the play-offs was worked out. The matter of keeping Garneau in to the end was something else again. Garneau had been in politics long enough to know that his campaign was gathering no momentum. “Among the people who had been expected to support us, 50 percent were voting for Ryan,” recalled Garneau’s chief organizer, Léonce Mercier, who later surfaced as director general of the federal Liberal party’s Quebec wing. “At the beginning, our surveys showed we had

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800 delegates, we didn’t advance one vote in four months. And at the convention, people came with their minds made up.” Garneau had his reports from the riding conventions, and he knew his numbers didn’t add up. He also knew from his own appearances, despite many fine performances, that the audiences weren’t listening to him. “There was a kind of wall,” Garneau said much later, “they weren’t reasoning, they weren’t listening, and you couldn’t argue very easily against that. “That was very difficult for me,” he said in late 1980, before Ryan’s own defeat in the 1981 election, “and even today I look at that and say maybe I should have said this. But I’m still looking for the new ideas the Liberal party was supposed to benefit from under the leadership of Mr. Ryan. What does it stand for today in terms of political philosophy, the Liberal party of Quebec?” As bitter as he would be in defeat, Garneau was quite resigned to his fate on the weekend of April 14 to 15, and quite determined to see it through. For above all else, Garneau was a party man. The party was all he had known, all his adult life. He had hardly stepped off the plane from the University of Geneva, when he went to work for the Quebec Liberal Federation, as it was then called, in Quebec City. It was the summer of 1963. Garneau was only 28 years old. Since the ruling Lesage Liberals were then at the peak of their power, at the height of the Quiet Revolution, it was an exciting time to be in Quebec. And Garneau, as the assistant secretary general of the party in power, soon became known to, and relied on by, the men in power. Before long, he was on Lesage’s staff. When the premier went down to a stunning defeat in the 1966 election, a victim in a sense of his own politique de grandeur, Garneau stayed on with him in opposition. From a junior member of the premier’s staff, he became Lesage’s senior aide in opposition. He also became a kind of son to the former premier, who confided in Garneau as early as the summer of 1967 that it was his intention to leave politics. But he stayed on, and Garneau stayed with him, through the tumultuous departure of René Lévesque in the fall of that year, and through the next two years. Until Lesage decided to remove himself to the sidelines, Garneau had ample opportunity to observe a legislative master at work. Though the opposition stood the traditional two drawn sword lengths across from Daniel Johnson and his ministers, the Unionist government was often at sea on legislative drafting, and very much on the quiet they would often consult Lesage. Garneau would later recall one instance in which Lesage, truly the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, wrote up a bill in his own hand in the presence of the clerk of the legislature. (In later years, he

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would receive more material rewards for his knowledge, when his Grande Allée law firm was retained by the Bourassa government to write much of its important legislation.) And Garneau was with Lesage when the former premier decided he had finally had enough of the unseemly scheming for the leadership crown. “My decision is taken,” Lesage told Garneau one day in 1969. “I’m quitting. I’m resigning tomorrow. I’m calling for a leadership convention. I want you to call so-and-so and so-and-so and ask them to come to my chalet at Lac Beauport, because I want them to know about it before I announce it.” With Lesage until the end, Garneau stayed on in the lame duck leader’s office during the fall of 1969 and into the convention of January 1970 that saw the election of Robert Bourassa, only a year older than himself. In the triumphs of the first Bourassa administration, Garneau played a considerable role as the energetic and capable young finance minister. And it was Garneau, in the darkest days of the second Bourassa administration, who stood loyally by his leader and played down speculation that he was the party’s logical heir. So having stayed a difficult course in the leadership campaign, he could at least stay in for his speech, and he could say with some conviction that Raymond Garneau would never conduct a campaign at the expense of Robert Bourassa, a line that brought down the house on both sides of the aisle. As he stood there before the Saturday afternoon vote, delivering one of the great speeches in the modern-day annals of Quebec politics, he was making the kind of impression that would count only much later on. For the speech was the sum and substance of all he stood for. He knew it by heart and it came from the heart. “Quebec is my home,” he said, “but Canada is my country.” At that moment, Garneau had repaid any debts that might have been outstanding with the party. But he was under no illusions about the impact it might have on the vote. “The speech did nothing,” Garneau was to say later. “It changed nothing. I’m convinced it didn’t change one vote in the room. Because people weren’t listening to me.” But by then, the convention organizers had themselves their television spectacular. As interim leader Gérard D. Lévesque got up to deliver the keynote address at the Friday night session, he could take some satisfaction from the fact that he had put the party back on its feet. From a nadir of 35,000 members at the time he picked up Bourassa’s fallen mantle of leadership, the party membership rolls had doubled during the course of the four-month leadership campaign. The two candidates had performed well, aside from the obvi-

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ous and bitter personal animosities that were bound to surface in a two-man race. There was a clear difference between them on the important issues of the constitution and language rights. On the constitution, Ryan was the candidate of the third option, favoring a fundamental realignment of the Canadian federal system along the lines that would later emerge in his party’s so-called “Beige Paper” issued in January of 1980. Garneau also favored a renewed federalism, but was perceived as more of an orthodox federalist than Ryan. On the language issue, both candidates favored amendments to the Lévesque government’s Charter of the French Language, commonly known as Bill 101, which would ease the restrictions on access to English-language schooling for the children of Canadian citizens moving in from other provinces. Both candidates also spoke of amending the language law’s controversial regulations limiting the use of bilingual signs and advertising, even in predominantly English-speaking neighborhoods. The clear-cut intellectual divergences of the two candidates restored a semblance of self-respect to the Liberals. No longer did it seem that the Péquistes had a monopoly on ideas or, for that matter, on virtue. Gérard D. Lévesque’s major achievement as interim leader was getting the party to wait this long, seventeen months to the day after its defeat, to select a new leader. “There were certainly many, maybe a majority, who wanted to go to a convention right away,” he said later. “They were looking for a magic way of revitalizing the party right away. This is a normal reaction. But I was convinced that time was necessary to get back to the grass roots as much as possible.” It was not for nothing that Lévesque had been in the legislature since 1956, and fought seven elections, of which the Liberals had won four and lost three. He knew the rhythms of politics, knew that 1977 was the year of the pq, and that time would be the best healer for the wounds of his party. So the exercise of leadership in the interim was largely a process of marking time. At the first meeting of the Liberal general council at the end of February 1977, Lévesque needed all the help he could muster from the establishment wing of the party to head off a move for an early convention. And then he forced Liberal activists into the street in the first door-to-door fundraising campaign in the party’s history. It was a bit of a disaster, raising only a few hundred thousand dollars, but he thought it was important that rank-and-filers get used to the idea of direct contact with the voter. It was the best means of pulling in new members, and in any event it was the law of the land, since the Lévesque government’s Bill 2, the new political parties financing

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act, simply abolished the corporate donations that had always been the principal means of support for the Liberals. So in that sense, Gérard D.’s fund-raising campaign was a qualified success. By the time Ryan became leader a year later, the party troops were ready to march on the first of several campaigns that raised more than $8 million for the referendum and the general election. By the time of Ryan’s defeat in 1981, most of the money had been spent, a good deal of it on regional office staff to support his province-wide organization. By the time of his resignation in August of 1982, the party had also dipped into its substantial reserves. The Liberals, not to put too fine a point on it, were practically broke. But that is getting ahead of the story. When Louis Rémillard finally gavelled the leadership convention to order in Quebec eight months later, there were 2,640 delegates, twenty-four from each of the 110 ridings in the National Assembly as it was then constituted, of which twelve from each county were women and four were youth delegates under the age of 20. Finally, they were getting the show on the road. It began on the Friday afternoon with a sentimental appearance by Lesage, who was nominally reporting in for the Pre-Referendum Committee he had agreed to chair at the request of Gérard D. Lévesque. But it was mostly for the applause. It had been twenty years since his own election as leader. But since his retirement in 1970, Lesage had made only one public appearance, the previous year, when he stood up at a meeting of the bar association in Quebec to register his disapproval of certain aspects of Bill 101. As Lesage made his way to the podium, it was apparent that the years had only improved his appearance. He looked more distinguished, more a premier, than ever. And when he spoke, in that distinctively deep voice of his, it was clear that he still had the magic. When he had come to power in 1960, it was the end of the era known as the noirceur, the darkness, meaning the age of Maurice Duplessis. Now Lesage spoke of another noirceur, in the option of separation or independence. It was a gloomy perspective but a powerful one. The Lesage appearance overshadowed the last direct confrontation between the two candidates, who took turns at the podium answering questions from the floor. The Friday night session was to have been Gérard D. Lévesque’s big moment, the moment for him to deliver one of his joyous stemwinders that made him a kind of Hubert Humphrey of Quebec politics. There is no doubt that Lévesque always left the impression of a happy warrior. “What a wonderful family,” he began on a typical note. The only problem for Lévesque and the Liberals was that the cbc and RadioCanada journalists covering the convention staged a walkout just as the networks went on the air. So while there was a picture and sound

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of the event, there was no commentary. As things turned out it was just as well. Lévesque was only a few minutes into his speech when the Garneau organizers released thousands and thousands of balloons from the ceiling of the arena. “At that point,” said Ryan’s chief organizer, Jacques Lamoureux, “we decided to bring out our scarves.” There they were, waves of red scarves, with Ryan’s partisans chanting their campaign refrain, “Ryan, Ryan,” to the tune of “Amen, Amen.” What was going on, in the middle of a keynote address by the interim leader, with candidates’ demonstrations expressly forbidden, were two full-fledged demonstrations for the candidates. The Ryan people were determined not to be outdone. Most neutral observers on the floor were horrified. “I was very shocked for Gérard D.,” said Louis Rémillard. “I didn’t see the tv. It looked terrific.” Indeed it did look terrific. In the absence of commentators to explain to viewers why pandemonium had broken loose on the floor, it looked to viewers as if Lévesque was hitting every applause line imaginable. He must have sensed this, because he got through his speech, even though no one in the crowd of 10,000 people was paying him the slightest attention. And in the Ryan delegation, the most remarkable sight was the candidate himself, standing and waving a red scarf as enthusiastically as his followers. Afterwards, many observers thought it inappropriate, that he should have merely accepted the acclaim. “Look, that’s very simple,” Ryan said. “I had a choice to make. I had to remain seated or participate with the other people. If I had remained seated, people would have said, he wants all this homage. So I chose the other way. I chose to become involved like the rest of my people. It’s as simple as that. And I was never really overwhelmed by that.” But reporters who had worked with and covered Ryan over the years were startled by the complete transformation of the austere director of Le Devoir into the exuberant candidate, waving his scarf and even egging his people on. Ryan had every reason to enjoy himself at the convention. His campaign had the Garnistes outnumbered, outorganized and outbussed right in Garneau’s own backyard of Quebec. When Garneau’s supporters arrived at the convention for the Friday night keynote, they were angered to find that a huge Ryan claque had already occupied most of the non-reserved spectators’ seats. As the Ryan crowd arrived, they found two “Leadership: Ryan” posters beside each seat. “We had 20,000 posters spread around the arena,” Lucette St. Amant said later. When it was pointed out that a crowd of only 10,000 people was expected, she said, “Well, they’ve all got two hands.”

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The dispersing of the posters all around the arena, to give the impression that the Ryan camp was everywhere, was something that was first tried at Pierre Trudeau’s convention in 1968, and repeated at the Bourassa convention of 1970. This was not the only detail copied from the previous federal and provincial leadership campaigns, which was not surprising, since many of the same people who had worked in the Trudeau and Bourassa leadership camps, now turned up in the Ryan organization. The Ryan floor communications system was exactly the same as one that had worked so flawlessly for Trudeau and Bourassa. The Ryan campaign added its own wrinkle to check the delegate counts. Ryan campaign chairman Guy Saint-Pierre called it a “foolproof system of double pointage, one from regional coordinators, the other from riding sources who doubled-checked tallies after the election of the slates.” By the time the Ryan forces arrayed themselves on the convention floor before the Saturday afternoon vote, chief organizer Lamoureux was ready to go on television with a firm prediction. He said that Ryan would win 1,750 delegates. The final result was actually 1,748 to Garneau’s 804, a smashing majority and eerily close to Lamoureux’s prediction. “We joked that two student delegates couldn’t make it because they were studying for exams,” Lamoureux said. Since Ryan obviously had a lock on the convention, he had every reason to be looking serene as he sat, surrounded by his family and advisers in his box just down from the vip lodge, whereas Lesage was very much the guest of honor. Lesage was not the only former premier to be present. Another Friday night arrival was Robert Bourassa, accompanied by his wife, Andrée. Bourassa’s European exile had come to an end. He had spent the better part of a year commuting between Brussels, Paris, Montreal and his winter condominium in Bal Harbour, Florida. Practically on the morrow of his defeat, Bourassa sensed that one of the crucial tests of the pq thesis would be the arguments for economic association after sovereignty. Bourassa determined to study the European model of economic association, the Common Market, headquartered in Brussels. He would go there and arm himself with rebuttals to the Péquiste argument. In the process, he hoped to begin a kind of rehabilitation, and perhaps in time even carve out a small but significant place for himself in the referendum debate. In Brussels, he immersed himself in everything from the European Economic Community’s constitution, the Treaty of Rome, to the diverse factions composing the European parliament. It was neither a rest holiday nor a

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sightseeing tour. “Most people visit museums in Europe,” commented a friend. “Bourassa visits parliaments.” By the spring of 1978, he was back in North America, commuting between Montreal and Washington, where he was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute of Canadian Studies. But his appearance at the leadership convention was his first public foray since his defeat. Many voices and eyebrows were raised in the Liberal establishment, where Bourassa was still considered a political leper. Finally, it was Gérard D. Lévesque, acting on his own, who decided that Bourassa should be invited as a simple courtesy. All the former leaders were being invited. Bourassa was a former leader, therefore the invitation included him. But he would not be asked to speak. He would appear with the other former leaders, Lesage, Georges-Emile Lapalme and George Marler, in a Friday night film short on the party’s history. That seemed enough for Bourassa, who was grateful just to be there. He arrived to polite applause, and an instant gathering of reporters, many of whom had gleefully savaged “Bou-Bou” during his years in power. He was, to most appearances, little changed in the last year and a half. He wasn’t any heavier that you would notice. He kept in trim with his same old swimming routine. But the Bourassa bodyguard, who had doubled as the premier’s hairdresser in the old days, was gone. He was no longer the carefully combed premier. There was something else. He had changed his severe horn-rimmed glasses for a pair of rounder glasses that softened his bony features. “I had to change my image,” he told one reporter who asked him about it. “The other one wasn’t very good.” It had been eight months since Bourassa had seen Ryan, in August of the previous year, when the former premier and his wife went to the Ryan family’s rented summer cottage at the Chanteclerc compound at Ste. Adele, fifty miles north of Montreal. The dinner was at Ryan’s invitation, as a courtesy to a forgotten man, and because he evidently wanted Bourassa’s opinion on the tentative Ryan draft, which had started up during the summer. It was Ryan’s first period of reflection, and Bourassa came away with the impression that he wouldn’t do it. “He said that he was not anxious to go into an unknown world,” Bourassa later recalled. “That for him it was an unknown world. That is to say, a world he didn’t know, a world in which he knew little of those things. He was very reluctant to enter a new world while he was at Le Devoir, which gave him a lot of security.” Be that as it may, Ryan did enter that unknown world the following January, and by the time of the convention he had impressed most observers with his performance under close scrutiny during the leader-

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ship campaign. But he remained fundamentally contemptuous of the way things were done in political campaigns. If his handlers told him to go in by one door, he would almost certainly go in the other, just to show them he was not their puppet. If he was urged to go directly to a podium, he was almost certain to linger in the back of the hall, shaking hands and kissing ladies on both cheeks. “The candidate was not always easy to organize,” acknowledged Ryan’s campaign chairman Guy Saint-Pierre, the former Bourassa trade minister who was now a senior vice-president of Montreal’s Ogilvie Mills, an outpost of the Brascan empire. “He could be unpredictable and stubborn. But for crowds he was surprisingly good. Very early in the game it became apparent that he was very effective in rural Quebec.” And why not? He had been traveling the province, not only for the last fifteen years as director of Le Devoir, but for more than fifteen years before that as the general secretary of Catholic Action. He was very much at home in the Louisevilles and the Victoriavilles of Quebec. “He touched on a lot of sensitive chords,” as Saint-Pierre pointed out. “He touched on traditional values, sensible values.” Before a large audience in a big city, Ryan could be fatally boring, with his head down as he plowed resolutely through an arid text. But in those days people were listening to him, and he was being hailed, as Saint-Pierre said, “as a man who not only understood complex problems but could summarize them in a simple way.” Ryan was showing the press and the public another side of himself that had been rarely glimpsed outside the confidential precincts of Le Devoir. He had not the slightest hesitation in putting on the brass knuckles and getting down to a good old-fashioned political street fight. Arriving late for a Quebec City news conference in the midwinter leadership campaign, Ryan blamed his tardiness on the “inexcusable negligence” of the pq government in clearing the highways into the capital. Shades of Maurice Duplessis. There was even a passing physical resemblance, beginning with the lawyerly pose of the thumbs hooked into the vest, and ending with the beakish nose. The emerging character of the streetfighter was seen in those days as a fascinating new aspect of Ryan’s public personality. In time, the combative side of Ryan’s nature would come to work against him. He would eventually be seen not as a streetfighter but as a bully. But back then, in the spring of 1978, he could do no wrong. What would later be identified as his mesquinerie, a certain meanness of spirit, was then perceived as proof that he had successfully made the jump from the intellectual world of his newspaper to the real world, the down and dirty world, of politics.

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Yet it was for his ideas, in quantity alone, that Ryan very quickly made his mark. It wasn’t enough just to talk of them from a platform. For Ryan, because of the world he came from, an idea didn’t exist unless it was down on paper somewhere. Two weeks before the convention, he summoned reporters to his campaign office in Montreal where he put out a forty-page position paper called “Thoughts on the Challenge of the Future Years.” When you held the paper up against the light, the authorship was as clear as a Rolland watermark. The Ryan touch was apparent throughout the original French version and the translation. The main points were enumerated, 2-a-b-c-d, just as in thousands of newspaper editorials he had written over the years. And the words spoke of his attachment to Quebec as a “truly distinct national community,” and his commitment to Canada as a country that has “acquired the fundamental political liberties for its citizens.” To those who argued that Quebec’s development had been stunted by the federal system, Ryan was able to reply that the flowering of fundamental freedoms in Quebec society “were not simply historical accidents, independent of our federal system. The diversity which characterizes the make-up of the Canadian population was also responsible for the climate of tolerance which favored the growth of these basic human freedoms.” It wasn’t that such thoughts were entirely unheard of in Quebec in those days, it’s just that Ryan lent them a certain intellectual currency. He was a forceful personality, celebrated for his intellectual rigor, and in the winter and spring of 1978 he was helping to make the federalist option respectable in Quebec again. For nearly a year and a half, the pq had occupied most of the political space in Quebec, making the provincial Liberals appear almost like an irrelevant third party in its fight with the Trudeau Liberals in Ottawa. Ryan served notice during those weeks that he intended to be in the fray. In a later period, when it became fashionable to say that Ryan proved to be a bad leader, it was rather too easily forgotten in Liberal circles that in the space of a few months, he had helped the Liberals regain their selfrespect. Years later, when it was generally accepted that Ryan was in an impossible predicament as between Trudeau and Lévesque, it was also rather too easily forgotten that there had been a clamor for a “third option” that would satisfy the demands of Quebec for more autonomy within a Canadian framework. The comedian Yvon Deschamps had suggested in one of his more famous monologues that what the people of the province really wanted was a “free Quebec in a united Canada.” To the amusement of some observers, Ryan called for exactly the same thing, “a free and open Quebec within a united Canada.” He put it

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that way in his position paper of early April, and he repeated it from the podium of the convention two weeks later. There were three significant aspects to the Ryan position paper, two of which received wide coverage and one of which was generally ignored. There was heavy reporting in the French media of Ryan’s comments on constitutional arrangements, while the English media were more concerned with his statements on minority language rights. This was the usual dichotomy of the Montreal media, reporting the same story, in the same city, to different readers with different concerns. Both the English and the French news outlets missed the third aspect of the Ryan paper, namely his concept of public administration and its role in the Quebec economy. Even back then, Ryan was sounding a warning that the size of government, and the spending of government, were dangerously out of control. “In the last fifteen years,” Ryan noted, “the public and parapublic sectors have shown phenomenal growth almost everywhere in the world. In this respect, as in many others, Quebec is first in growth, even though its resources are more limited than others. From these factors stem the greater difficulties Quebec faces today and will face tomorrow.” He pointed out that public expenditures in Quebec had risen faster in 1977 than the Gross Domestic Product of Quebec, by nearly 13 percent in the space of one year. “This means,” he noted, “that the spending power of the private sector is reduced in favor of the public sector.” These observations would later take on a prophetic quality when viewed from the perspective of the lean and mean 1980s. By then, incredibly, Ryan was gone from the scene. But on April 15, 1978, Ryan looked very much like the savior the Liberal party had been looking for. The Liberals were quite certain they were selecting not only the leader of the federalist forces, but also the next premier of the province. He had said if he ever entered politics, he would never impose himself. And here he was, being acclaimed. But it was going to be a long afternoon. First, each candidate had half an hour to address the convention, then the delegates would line up to vote, dropping a token into a slot beside the name of either contender. Then the convention organizers meant to take as much time as they could to stretch the afternoon broadcast of the convention on into evening prime time. Through most of it, Ryan sat in his box, surrounded by his family and closest advisers. When it came his turn to speak, following Garneau’s heartfelt appeal for votes, Ryan made a speech that was also quite remarkable, not for its delivery, but for its content. For fifteen years at Le Devoir, he had been developing and articulating his position on Quebec’s future. Now as he stood at center

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ice of the Coliseum, he had an opportunity not merely to express his views but to weld them onto the party that had sought him out. The Ryan outlook could be summarized as a nationalist perspective in a Canadian context. It was different from, say, the economic nationalism espoused by Robert Bourassa, in that Ryan began from historical premises. He was himself the intellectual heir of Henri Bourassa, the firebrand who had broken with Wilfrid Laurier to go off on his own and found Le Devoir in 1910. The newspaper was to play a pamphleteering role in Laurier’s downfall at the polls the following year. Ryan was only the fourth in the line of Le Devoir directors, and never in the paper’s history had the constitutional question been on the national agenda so much as during Ryan’s own time. At all events, he tried, as he did this day, to stand for both the fleur-de-lys and the maple leaf. “First of all, we are Quebecers,” he told the convention. “We also want to enjoy all the desirable guarantees of freedom within the whole of Canada. We are equally Canadians. We are equally partisans of maintaining the Canadian link. It’s in the Canadian path that Quebecers have the most opportunities to develop their freedom together.” When Ryan stepped down from the podium, it was all over but the voting. Because some of the delegates had difficulty dropping their tokens, it became one of those time-consuming timesavers that seem to haunt leadership conventions. By the time they finished counting the ballots, the convention managers had already used up their scheduled television period. But since they knew there was no way the networks could very well go off the air before the result was announced, they delayed the announcement for more than an hour, leaving Ryan fifteen minutes for an acceptance address. And so they figured to stay on the air, with millions of viewers, right up to the start of the Canadiens’ playoff telecast at eight o’clock. What they didn’t count on was Ryan going on for as long as he did, more than half an hour, talking right into the hockey game. Thus in his first act as leader, he managed to irritate a significant number of voters. When Louis Rémillard finally appeared on the podium to announce the result, there was no great explosion. Habemus papam, he would say in as many words, and the result was no surprise. Ryan, 1748, Garneau, 807. Ryan had no advance word of the result. “I heard it the first time when it was given in public,” he said. Only a few minutes before, he had turned to his wife and said that even if he lost he wouldn’t mind because he had done what he had to do. He was not only l’homme de Devoir, but true to its slogan, “fais ce que dois.” “I would have done what I had to do.” he said. “And then I would

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have done something else. I wouldn’t have been a broken man at all.” As for Garneau, there was nothing for him to do but brace himself with a gallant smile and make his way to the podium for the traditional concession. But by the time he got there, it somehow turned out that Ryan spoke before him. This was the main reason Ryan’s victory speech was remembered as the words of a sore winner, apart from its tending to put viewers to sleep. For there was certainly nothing ungracious about it. Though he referred to Garneau only as “my opponent,” he was generous in his praise for him. “First of all,” he began, “I’d like to extend my thanks and congratulations to my opponent in this arduous contest. Only both of us can know all the difficulties of this race.” It was, he continued, “a healthy rivalry, difficult for the candidates but good for democracy.” Years later, Ryan still rankled at the suggestion he had been mean to his opponent. Over Christmas of 1980, after viewing a tape of the sequence on his brother Yves’s home-video recorder, he finally knew that he had been unfairly perceived. “First when Garneau walked up to the podium, you remember that he first shook hands with Gérard Lévesque and then I was waiting around for an opportunity to shake hands with him. He immediately came to me. I came to him. We both went to each other. We shook hands rather warmly. And in my speech, I referred to him, explicitly, at least four or five times.” He also referred to just about everyone else associated with his campaign, including his mother Blandine Ryan, who seemed to be enjoying her moment at his side. She had been, he said, “a Liberal militant from the turn of the century,” and he apologized to her for “making her wait so long,” before he joined up himself. The challenge of the leadership, he said, “was beyond the capacity of my frail shoulders,” but he accepted it “in a spirit of humility and docility. You may be surprised to hear those words from me. But they have been among the key words of my adult life.” Of himself, he went on, “I’m sometimes told that I’m a bit arrogant. This is not true. It’s a tendency toward candor.” By this time, some of the caucus members around him were barely suppressing yawns, but he was not finished. He wanted to speak to the rest of the country. “To our fellow Canadians from other provinces who may be listening tonight,” he said, “I want to say greetings. We won’t wait until the next election before we start talking as brothers with leaders from other provinces. We will open conversations as free citizens have always been authorized to do.” But he sounded a sober note. “I hope you won’t be led to believe that because this convention took place and Claude Ryan was elected leader of the Liberal party that our problems have disappeared. Our

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problems have not disappeared. They won’t melt away with a single leadership convention.” And so finally it was left to Garneau to have the last word, and the hall began to empty even as he spoke. In his dressing room a few minutes later, there were two visitors of note: Robert Bourassa and Paul Desrochers, come to congratulate him for staying in. Then he rounded up his wife Pauline and their two children. A car was waiting for them at the front entrance. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.” The convention of the scarves and the balloons was over.

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7 The Ryan Express

Ryan was not the sort to take vacations, never had been in thirty-five years of public life, and he wasn’t about to start now in politics. “You’ll understand there’s no rest on the day after you become leader of a political party,” Ryan told reporters after a series of meetings on the morrow of the convention. He meant to control the party he once called “a monster.” He had feared it once, and may have had reason to fear it still, this party of insurance salesmen and lawyers, of management consultants and county organizers. If he really meant to make it over in his own image and his own ideas, then he had to take it over. And control it he would, from the party’s two-storey office over a policeman’s credit union in East-Central Montreal, to the lonelier outposts of Liberalism in the backacres of the province. For Ryan, there were several compelling reasons to consolidate his hold on the party, and to do so quickly. First, there was his continuing concern, almost his obsession, with the sum and sources of the party’s finances. There was no shortage of funds in the party’s reserve held in account number 8-800 at the Montreal Trust, and administered by three trustees, including the redoubtable Paul Desrochers. It was not lost on Ryan that whoever controlled the party’s cash reserve would have a very large say in the organization of an election and the organizers in place. Ryan surely remembered that Desrochers had made some rather threatening noises back in his January conversation with Brian Mulroney, perhaps nothing more than empty words at a chance meeting in a Montreal restaurant. Nevertheless, even the threat of Desrochers throwing his weight

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around had nearly been enough to derail The Ryan Express even before it left the station. So here was Ryan, fresh from his triumph at the convention, with the party at his feet, and who should be holding the pursestrings but the legendary “Paul D.” Moreoever, Desrochers was a man with his own friends and protegés already in place, not only at the constituency level around the province, but at the heart of Ryan’s leadership campaign and at the top of the party pyramid in Montreal. Ryan’s chief organizer, Jacques Lamoureux, paid his dues to the party in Desrochers’ time. At the party office in Montreal, the director general, Ronald Poupart, had been in place since before the 1976 election. And there was Pierre Bibeau, then organizer for the ridings between Montreal and Quebec City, who had been installed in the party’s youth section at the beginning of the Bourassa years and had worked at Liberal headquarters ever since. Ryan was insecure to begin with, and he saw nothing to assuage his doubts as to the loyalty of the people he was inheriting. But first he would have to deal with “Mon oncle Paul.” “My first action,” Ryan later recalled, “was to suggest that I should have a contact with the trustees, who were in charge of the funds of the party. “I think Paul Desrochers called me, or I called him, and he came to see me.” The other trustees, also present, were Gilles Hébert who had become Ryan’s financial chairman, and retired businessman Ted Ryan. “We had a very cordial session,” Ryan recalled. “At the end of it, Mr. Desrochers said to me, ‘Mr. Ryan, I know that your regime is setting in. If you need my services, they will be available. If you don’t need them, I will understand.’ “He could not have had a better attitude. I said to him, thank you very much, I will get in touch with you.” Quite understandably, Ryan decided that the services of Paul Desrochers could be dispensed with. In Gilles Hébert, Ryan had someone who, it had developed, was his own man. And in the financial reserve, Gérard D. Lévesque was able to turn over some $3 million to the new leader. The Liberals, in other words, were flush. Ryan suddenly found himself with the means to install party functionaires whose loyalty he could rely on, since they would be dependent upon him to make a living. Ryan’s staffing of party headquarters in Montreal and Quebec with professional employees, and his opening up of regional offices around the province, were sources of friction and controversy among his own advisers. “There were two concepts,” said Jacques Lamoureux, “the volunteer concept and that of a paid staff. It was the latter than won out.”

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One of the losers in this organizational struggle was Lamoureux himself, who became one of the earliest of the dropouts around Ryan. He and Bibeau, representing opposite schools of thought, served briefly together as Ryan’s representatives on the Pre-Referendum Committee. Thereafter, Lamoureux did not surface again until the referendum campaign of 1980, when he performed a few errands for his original patron, André Ouellet. In the 1981 election, the whiz kid of 1978 was relegated to the function of an assistant organizer for the South Shore of Montreal. Through it all, Lamoureux’s small law practice was prospering in Old Montreal. Nor was it by coincidence that when Consumer Affairs Minister Ouellet set up an inquiry into the urea-formaldehyde insulation foam affair, it was his own organizer, Lamoureux, that he named as commissioner. Lamoureux did not regain Ryan’s favor until the summer of 1982, when the leader was drawing the wagons in a circle in a desperate attempt to save his leadership. By then it was too late, and Lamoureux told him so. With Lamoureux out, the organization vacuum was very quickly filled by Pierre Bibeau, only 29 in the fall of 1978 when he was named director general of the party to succeed Ronald Poupart. Bibeau, as Ryan liked to kid him, looked more like a Péquiste than a Liberal, with his unclipped beard and unkempt appearance. But he had gained Ryan’s confidence by making his tours outside Montreal run on time. “I discovered that Bibeau was in charge of about forty ridings,” Ryan said later. “He brought me to over thirty of those ridings during the fall months. I was struck with the precision of this boy’s work. When he had said to me, ‘At nine o’clock you will meet the mayor and his council. At 9:45 you will be at church for Mass. At 10:30 there will be a brunch. At 12:30 there will be a meeting with the local press. At 2:30 there will be a public meeting,’ everything worked according to plan. There was never a deviation from the program he had set. So I said to myself, this guy must be strong. “I was used to working with voluntary organizations and I knew they didn’t always work according to plan. Because your people don’t show up on that Sunday morning. And this guy let you down for this or that reason. Bibeau’s people were there and he had a strong hold over them. He was not domineering, he would let them do their work. He would stand in the back of the hall and say nothing to anyone.” Ryan came back from his rural swing in the fall of 1978, “with a very, very solid grasp of the problems, resources and prospects.” More than that Ryan, not the type to be easily impressed by anyone’s work, was convinced that Bibeau was “a very reliable man.” Nor did

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it hinder Bibeau’s prospects of advancement that he shared Ryan’s prejudice in favor of a predominantly professional staff. Finally, Bibeau fit in with Ryan’s plans to unload Ronald Poupart, a holdover from the Bourassa regime. From the day Ryan entered the Gilford street headquarters on the Tuesday following the convention, Poupart had put the resignations of the entire staff on the table. Since Ryan didn’t even know his way to the washroom at that point, he naturally kept everyone on for the start-up period of his leadership. But by the fall, he was prepared to dump Poupart and install his own man. “I did not get along well with Poupart because he was another sort of person,” Ryan said. “He was very nice to me, he was very cooperative, but he just didn’t have the kind of approach that I wanted. By the fall, I think it must have been in October, I told him frankly, ‘we cannot work together.’” But it did not take Poupart long to land on his feet as the operations director of the Pro-Canada Committee, the well-financed umbrella organization of federalist parties and unity groups. It was partially at Ryan’s recommendation that Poupart was hired by Pro-Canada chairman, Michel Robert. “At the time,” Robert said later, “Ryan suggested to me that he wanted to hire Poupart. It turned out that he wanted to get rid of him. Poupart thought Ryan had confidence in him. He was happy to come and I was happy to have him. We learned later that Ryan wanted to get rid of him.” In any event, Ryan had not heard the last of Poupart, or Robert, or of the Pro-Canada Committee. The Pro-Canada Committee was born as the Pre-Referendum Committee at a symposium organized by the Council of Canadian Unity at Quebec’s Château Frontenac over the first weekend of December in 1977. The keynote speaker at the founding meeting was none other, it will be recalled, than Claude Ryan, then between periods of reflection on the leadership issue and still very much the director of Le Devoir. He hailed the meeting as an “historic event.” Exactly one year later, he set out to destroy the Pro-Canada Committee. What had happened to him in the meantime was that he had changed jobs, and perspectives. It was all right for Ryan, the newspaper editorialist, to praise the coordinated efforts of the federalist forces. One would have expected no less of him. It was another thing for the leader of the Quebec Liberals, who expected to be the uncontested leader of the federalist forces, to share that authority with others. One would have expected no less from the leader of any party. As he told prc vice-president Marcel Masse in the summer of 1978:

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“If I have responsibility for the federal presence, I need to control the machinery. I’m going to assume control. Besides, it’s the law.” And so it was. According to Bill 92, the Lévesque government’s enabling legislation for referenda, the National Assembly would divide itself into provisional committees which would later form “national” committees. As Ryan would eventually take his seat as leader of the opposition, he would be the leader of the provisional No committee. But Masse, a one-time Union Nationale stalwart who had the distinction of being the youngest cabinet minister in Quebec history, was aware that Ryan was not merely concerned with legal proprieties. “He was afraid,” Masse said, “that Pro-Canada would become a political movement to do a job that he wanted the Liberals to do. In that sense, it was in his interest to make it disappear.” And that is exactly what Ryan did, though not without a rather unseemly struggle. In hindsight, it was clear what Ryan had in mind by the manner in which he dispensed with the Liberal party’s own referendum committee, which Jean Lesage had agreed to chair in 1977 at the request of interim leader Gérard D. Lévesque. On the day after Ryan’s election as Liberal leader, Lesage paid him a courtesy call in Quebec. “I place myself at your disposal,” Lesage said. “Mr. Lesage,” Ryan replied, “there’s a contradiction here. We cannot have two structural networks, the referendum structure and the party structure. There’s got to be one. It’s got to be under the same authority. So I want to let you know there’s a problem there.” As Ryan remembered it Lesage replied: “You’re in charge. Whatever you decide, I will accept.” Getting rid of the party’s own referendum committee, chaired by a man who entertained no further ambitions for himself, was one thing. Getting rid of the prc, with its collection of very live political egos, was quite another. “It was extremely delicate,” Ryan later admitted, “it took months before we could work things out to my satisfaction.” As Marcel Masse observed, “A machine like that was potentially dangerous for him,” in that it could assume a role he had in mind for his party and for himself. Ryan had another concern, and that was the money, in the millions, being raised from corporate sources by the ProCanada Foundation. It was soliciting corporate donations, in contravention of the spirit though not the letter of the Lévesque government’s Bill 2, the political parties’ financing law, which outlawed corporate political charity. Since the Pro-Canada Foundation was not financing a political party, it did not fall under the terms of the act, and it felt free

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to solicit donations up to $75,000 from some of the big chartered banks and up to $50,000 from crown corporations like Air Canada and Canadian National. Some of the money was also coming in from corporate sources outside the province. It had the potential for a public relations nightmare. As Ryan remembered telling the prc’s first chairman, Claude Castonguay, “We have got to rid ourselves of that kind of thing.” In August of 1978, Castonguay decided to clear out of the prc, and he called Michel Robert, urging him to take on the presidency of the revamped committee. Robert seemed to be the ideal candidate for the job. He was an articulate spokesman for any cause, and he had proved his organizational capacities as chairman of the party’s policy commission in putting together the successful convention of the previous November. More to the point, he was a charter member of an important influence in the Draft Ryan movement of the previous winter, and had lines into the federal Liberal network. On vacation in the Laurentians, Robert drove over to St. Donat, where the Liberal leader had taken a cottage in the month of August. “We spent the afternoon together,” Robert would recall. “As I understood it, he wanted the Liberal party to take control of the movement again. The other thing was that he wanted the committee to assume control of the pre-referendum period.” At least that was the impression that Robert carried away with him that day and on August 25 he was unanimously elected president of the prc. “At the time of my arrival,” Robert said, “it was as organized as a bordello. No, that’s going too far. A bordello is organized.” He was determined, he thought with Ryan’s full approval, to whip the place into shape and devise an operations plan. The first thing Robert did was to change the name of the umbrella group from Pre-Referendum Committee, which he thought too ambiguous. He could not call it the Quebec-Canada Committee, since that could be confused with one of its member groups, the QuebecCanada Movement, which had been at the heart of a squabble earlier that year for accepting a $265,000 grant from the feds. So Robert decided to state the umbrella’s aims squarely. He had the name changed to the “Pro-Canada Committee.” “I decided to do that independently of Ryan,” Robert said. That was his first mistake. As Robert later said of Ryan: “He often reproached me for that.” Robert had been sent to the Pre-Referendum Committee as Ryan’s man. Very quickly, on the revamped Pro-Canada Committee, he became the committee’s man, and his own man.

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“After a certain while,” Ryan remembered, “it became clear that he was not working in unison with me.” It developed that there was something else about Robert that Ryan didn’t like. Robert was extremely cosy with the cousins in Ottawa. Because he practised labor law, a predominantly provincial field, because he had been bâtonnier of the provincial bar at the age of 36, because he taught law at that strongly provincialist University of Montreal, because he had been head of the Quebec Liberal policy committee, Robert gave the impression of being of the Québec d’abord, Quebec First, school of federalism. In fact, he was also closely linked with the feds. He was then representing Ottawa before the federal McDonald Commission and provincial Keable Commission into the activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Ryan later said he was unaware of the extent of Robert’s relationship with the cousins. “I was going to discover – hadn’t known before,” said Ryan, “that he had some very, very strong affiliations with the federal people.” But it was the Poupart plan that ruptured the appearance of solidarity among the federalist forces. Within weeks of going over to ProCanada from the Quebec Liberal party, Poupart had drawn up an extensive and expensive plan for the referendum. He laid it before the committee on November 17. From even a cursory reading of the Poupart report, it was clear that its objectives and proposed plan of action were unacceptable to Ryan. “The gathering of the federalist force in Quebec under the umbrella of the Pro-Canada Committee is an accepted fact,” the report began. “Pro-Canada constitutes the only tool, means, and leadership available to partisans of the federalist cause.” Right away, Ryan must have been clearing his throat. But what he was really unable to swallow was Poupart’s organizational concept, which would have seen a central office of fourteen paid employees directing a volunteer organization in each of the province’s 110 ridings. And in each of those ridings, each of the Pro-Canada Committee’s fourteen member organizations would be entitled to two persons on the executive. From these 28-member executive committees on up to the head office, Poupart dubbed his campaign plan a “vertical structure.” It was vertical all right, about as vertical as the Tower of Babel. Quite apart from the practical impossibility of having 28-member local executive committees, Ryan also noted that each riding committee would be presided over by a sitting mp or Member of the National Assembly. In those days, there were barely two dozen Liberal mnas in Quebec, and over five dozen Liberal mps in the federal capital. Ryan may not have been a mathematician, but he could count, and he was not greatly enamored of the idea of such a highly visible federal presence.

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Finally, Ryan was horrified by the budgeting of the Poupart plan, which came in at $1,325,000 for 1979, which everyone then expected would be the referendum year. The Poupart budget included generous allocations of $625,000 for the headquarters staff, $200,000 for travel expenses and a further $200,000 for the preparation and dissemination of campaign materials and propaganda. These were not the sorts of things the parsimonious Ryan was known for spending money on. “As concerns its expenses and budget, the Pre-Referendum Committee should proceed with more care,” Ryan wrote in a memorandum to his party executive on December 7. “It should take initiatives that truly respond to the needs expressed by its member organizations, rather than creating a vast machine which is going to run up excessive costs.” At all events the Pre-Referendum Committee – it is perhaps significant that Ryan did not acknowledge the change of name – should take no decision without the unanimous approval of its 28-member board, including his two delegates. As for the Liberal party of Quebec, it would “complete its own organization down to the poll level.” This was on Pearl Harbor Day, and it was certainly the torpedoing of the Poupart plan. Robert tried to patch things up in two lengthy meetings with Ryan on the 14th and 15th of December. As Robert put in a private memorandum to his foundation president, Pierre Côté, he tried to explain to Ryan “that in my view the rule of unanimity would render the committee completely unworkable,” and that in any event, “other important member organizations of the committee, like the federal Liberal party,” were not prepared to grant the Quebec Liberals “the equivalent of a veto.” On the evening of December 15, the full Pro-Canada Committee met to formally consider the Poupart plan. It was accepted by a vote of 20 to 2, only Bibeau and Lamoureux dissenting. This time, the Quebec Liberals had their instructions from the leader. Ryan ordered Bibeau to “make no compromises in any way.” And so even as the plan was accepted it was doomed. Or as Robert put it, it lacked only two votes out of twenty-eight, but “Ryan won, 27 to 26.” Much later, Robert was prepared to admit that “maybe he was right, because we would have given a base to the Union Nationale or any third party. If 60 percent of the vote was federalist, Ryan wanted it to be indivisible” later on. Over the Christmas period of 1978, Robert’s outlook was hardly so sanguine. But he was the first to realize what was happening to him. Ryan was in the process of shutting him down. Ryan went back a long way, all the way back to the Catholic Action period, with Marc Lalonde, who was the undisputed boss of the

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Trudeau Liberals in Quebec. Ryan was able to persuade Lalonde, and through him Trudeau, that the Poupart operational plan was wholly impractical. It was also agreed in Ottawa that Ryan had to appear to be the leader of the federalist forces in the referendum. With the powerful federal Liberals lining up with Ryan against the Poupart plan, the position of Pro-Canada became quite untenable. Then Ryan administered the coup de grâce. He saw to it that Pro-Canada’s funds dried up. Ironically, it was the man who had raised the potentially troublesome millions who set in motion the process of turning off Pro-Canada’s tap. “I was the guy who was the sort of bagman,” said Redford MacDougall, a Montreal stock broker and scion of the old Golden Mile establishment. After cheerfully lowering the boom on every important chief executive officer in town, MacDougall just as cheerfully switched roles and got Ryan together with Pierre Côté for the purpose of cutting off the money. “It was a typical case of Ryan being right and everyone else being wrong,” MacDougall said, “though everyone was pretty sore about it at the time.” The combination of Lalonde pulling out the cousins, and Côté cutting off the money, brought the Pro-Canada follies to their inevitable conclusion the following February 25. “I called a meeting and folded the shop,” Robert said simply. He dismissed the option of fighting on against formidable odds. “If I had wanted to be leader of the party,” Robert told his staff, “I would have been a candidate. Ryan is the chief.” And with that, Pro-Canada closed its office at 550 Sherbrooke Street West, paid off its debts and disappeared. Of the $2.7 million raised by MacDougall, some $2.2 million remained with the foundation and would be spent later in 1979, largely on a billboard and advertising campaign, Le Canada, J’y suis, j’y reste; Here I am, Here I’ll stay. The billboards became controversial when a couple of them were blown up in the run-up to the referendum campaign. As for the Pro-Canada Committee, it had spent the other $500,000 and had exactly nothing to show for it. What Ryan had to show for the episode was who was in charge. The last and by his own admission the least of Ryan’s concerns was his relationship with his caucus in Quebec City. This may have been why, almost from the beginning, things seemed to go badly between him and his parliamentary wing. First, there was the matter of healing the rift with Garneau. Ryan thought he had made the appropriate gestures in his victory speech. A lot of people who saw it thought otherwise. But if Ryan was not going

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to be in the House himself, and he was plainly in no hurry to get himself a seat, then it stood to reason that he did not want Garneau to be too prominently spotlighted when the Assembly proceedings went on television in the fall of 1978. Ryan was quite determined that if Garneau were to stay on, it would be on the leader’s terms. “I anticipated very early his coolness toward Garneau,” said Ryan’s campaign president, Guy Saint-Pierre. “Long ago he had started discussing the role of the other mnas. I could see he was very determined that the number two man in the campaign would not be the second-incommand of the party.” Ryan kept referring to the fate of Robert Winters, who finished second to Pierre Trudeau in the 1968 federal Liberal convention, only to disappear over the political horizon. In effect, Saint-Pierre recalled, Ryan was saying that “Garneau would have to fall back into the ranks.” Then, when Ryan met his caucus for the first time for dinner at Quebec’s Reform Club in May, the vacationing Garneau was conspicuously absent, and the press made much of it. There was an awkward moment during the meeting when Victor Goldbloom, a man of great decency, considerable eloquence, and a charter Garneau supporter, stood up and made an impassioned plea for party unity. Instead of responding in kind, Ryan simply moved on to the next person who wanted to speak. It was a missed opportunity, and typical of Ryan’s difficulty in making the magnanimous gesture. Weeks went by without Ryan and Garneau meeting. Finally, at Ryan’s request, they got together one day for about fifteen minutes. Afterwards, Garneau always had the impression that the only purpose served by the encounter was that Ryan could tell reporters he had met with his defeated opponent, and so got that little monkey off his back. Nevertheless, Garneau availed himself of the occasion to offer Ryan some advice. “Mr. Ryan,” Garneau began, “you’re going to be premier, you’re going to be whether you want to or not, because it’s written in the heavens. The Liberals were re-elected on the morning of November 16, the day after the pq’s victory.” Garneau also said he advised Ryan to be careful about publishing a detailed and complex constitutional position before the referendum, one that federalists could not be unanimous on, one that the pq could obviously attack. Finally, Garneau suggested that Ryan should start thinking about getting himself a seat, though not Notre Dame de Grace, a predominantly English-speaking riding in West-End Montreal that had come open with the resignation of Bryce Mackasey a few days after the leadership convention. There were also rumors floating around that Robert Burns was about to resign the pq stronghold of

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Maisonneuve in East-End Montreal. Garneau told Ryan that if he was thinking about Maisonneuve for himself, he shouldn’t, that it was too big a risk. “It’s a risk you don’t have the right to run,” Garneau said. And that, after fifteen minutes or so, was that. There was nothing to be done about the awkwardness that existed between them. When Garneau’s ailing mother died a few months later, Ryan neither visited the salon nor did he send flowers. Instead he sent his executive assistant, Pierre Pettigrew, and a Mass card. Much was made of that by the unconverted Garnistes. “He asked me to go,” Pettigrew explained. “He said, ‘That family has been hurt a lot, hurt by my election, I don’t want them to be reminded by my presence of these wounds.’ Then people said Ryan didn’t send flowers. He offered Masses instead because he’s a practising Catholic, and Garneau’s a practising Catholic, he thought that more appropriate.” While these whispers of Ryan’s alleged lack of grace made the rounds of the caucus, the leader was usually elsewhere. “I would go and meet them about once a week, once every two weeks,” he said in 1980. “I had told Gérard Lévesque, ‘You handle that side of the operation.’ I had not too much interest in it; to be frank with you, I felt my work was elsewhere.” Ryan’s neglect, benign or otherwise, was to lead to his first major blowup with the caucus in November over two issues, the matter of his getting into the House, and the question of appointing a new chief organizer for the party. Ryan listened to about two hours of this and promised a reply the following week. When he met his deputation the next time, Ryan minced no words. “The answer to your first question is a categorical no,” he said. “There will be no chief organizer at this point. We will structure the party and stop having all authority rest with one individual. Those days are finished. I will tolerate no more discussion on that.” As for the matter of Ryan getting into the House, he was under a lot of pressure because the proceedings were televised for the first time in the fall of 1978. For many Liberals, it was urgent that he be there. “In the minds of some people perhaps,” Ryan said later, “not in my mind particularly.” He had some eminent advice to the contrary, from Jean Lesage for one, who told him “to stay away from that hole” until the next election, as Lesage himself had done after his own accession to the leadership in 1958, free to concentrate on his electoral responsibilities. But Lesage’s day had been before television, before a televised referendum debate. The consensus was that Ryan had to be there, but as he himself pointed out to his caucus, no one was offering his seat.

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“You’re all talking about it,” he told them, “but I haven’t heard one member here suggesting that he might be willing to resign his seat in my favor. So there’s no vacancy, no seat available, don’t talk about it. And I won’t tolerate any talk unless there’s something we can discuss.” After that, Ryan said, his caucus “realized for the first time the kind of guy they’d be dealing with.” Perhaps in more ways than he knew.

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8 Observe, Judge, Act

“He’s a foreign body with the Liberals,” observed eminent journalist and commentator Jean-V. Dufresne, who knew both the man and the party well. “They’ve got a fantastic reflex for rejecting the transplant until they’ve taken power.” In 1981, when Ryan unexpectedly lost an election he was supposed to win, the patient did reject the transplant. But for three years, from his election as leader until his defeat at the polls, Ryan held absolute sway over the party. “This guy’s going to be another Duplessis,” ventured one charter member of the Draft Ryan movement at the time. “He needs us now to win the leadership. Afterwards, he’ll get rid of us.” For the people who had seen his leadership campaign close-up, it was astonishing how many insiders were soon out of the picture. From the campaign hierarchy, the young campaign director Jacques Lamoureux was squeezed out in an office power play within six months. A young Montreal lawyer named James Masson, who had served as Ryan’s tour director, discovered that Ryan didn’t even remember his name. He never worked for him again. Like many disillusioned members of the rank and file, they remained convinced that Ryan was the man of the moment, but in their own moments they wanted nothing more to do with the man. On the policy side, most of the original braintrusters eventually fell out with Ryan. This was brutally emphasized by the composition of the federal delegation at the 1980 constitutional summit. If Ryan was watching the proceedings, he could not have failed to notice the

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presence, over Pierre Trudeau’s shoulder, of Michel Robert and Raynold Langlois. Robert, who arranged for Ryan’s critical appearance at the 1977 policy convention, never got along with Ryan after their split over the Pro-Canada Committee in early 1979. Langlois, a Grande Allée lawyer and scion of one of Quebec’s oldest political families, served Ryan as late as 1980 as chairman of the party’s important constitutional commission which in January of that year produced the “Beige Paper.” Barely eight months after its publication, its principal author had in a sense gone over to the other side, since the Trudeau option was substantially different from the constitutional perspectives of the ‘Beige Paper” (on days when he was trying to distance himself from the document, Ryan would occasionally refer to it as the Langlois Report. When he spoke of it in approving terms, it was the “Beige Paper,” for the color of the book’s cover). In a parliamentary caucus, Ryan got off to a bad start at his first meeting when he ignored Victor Goldbloom’s conciliatory speech. He even managed to alienate some of his own charter supporters like André Raynauld. With Raynauld, matters with Ryan came to a head over the leader’s criteria for candidates, issued at a general council at Sherbrooke in the fall of 1979. The criteria listed things like financial integrity, a college degree, and a model domestic life. The newspapers had a field day. And intellectuals like Raynauld, who had their own ideas of organizing a liberal democracy, were simply appalled. “I was so furious I couldn’t speak,” Raynauld said later. “I was so angry I couldn’t give my opinion in a rational way. The worst of it was that we had a caucus meeting on the eve of that and he didn’t say a word about it, not a word.” Raynauld had been forced to his knees by Ryan over the matter of his seven conditions for entering the leadership race in 1978. After that they never quite established the good working relationship you might expect between a leader and his chief economic spokesman. Raynauld, a former chairman of the Economic Council of Canada, found that Ryan treated him like a schoolboy. In the referendum, “he wanted to orchestrate everything,” Raynauld complained. “He’s a man who has the fault of his qualities,” Raynauld observed after he left politics in 1980. “He has a certain meanness of spirit with regard to others. He’s a man who has business relations with people. You play a role. I play a role. He’s not the type to pat you on the back, but he’s very cold, very businesslike. He’s a very complex man.” The origins of the relationship between Ryan and Raynauld were typical of Quebec’s emerging political and social elites after the Second World War. With a few exceptions, like Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque, they had their beginnings in Catholic Action, the lay

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movements of the Church Militant. Claude Ryan was only 20 years old in 1945 when he was named the first general secretary of L’Action Catholique Canadienne in Montreal, a post in which he remained for the next seventeen years. Along the way, he would meet the people who would become a virtual Who’s Who of Jean Lesage’s Quiet Revolution and, later, Pierre Trudeau’s French Power in Ottawa. To one eminent member of that pioneer generation, sociologist Guy Rocher, Catholic Action was nothing less than “the beachhead of the Quiet Revolution.” For André Raynauld, “the Quiet Revolution was not after 1970, it took place between 1945 and 1960. It was a revolution of the mind.” Typically, Raynauld worked for Ryan in the summer of 1951, in the university youth section along with another student named Marc Lalonde. Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique (jec) was one of the mainspring movements whose activities were coordinated to a certain degree by Ryan, working out of an office in the Archbishop’s Palace on Cathedral Street. This made him somewhat suspect among those activists who regarded him as the eyes of the bishops, and who resented any interference by the clergy in their affairs. The Jécistes were one of the pioneer Catholic Action movements in Canada, founded by the Holy Cross Fathers on the campus of College St. Laurent, in 1932. But the Oblate order was first to organize Catholic Action with the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (joc), who helped ease Quebec’s transition from a rural to an urban society in the recession-wracked 1930s. The Jocistes grew very quickly. By the mid-1930s, joc was operating nineteen federations in 172 parishes, with 6,000 members in four Canadian provinces. The Jocistes ran summer camps, provided temporary shelter, food, and clothing to young people down on their luck. It was the Jocistes who founded the Ligue Ouvrière Catholique (loc) in 1939. By the next year, they had formed some twenty-two chapters. By 1944, noted researcher Sandra Wheaton Dudley, some 15,000 militants attended a national convention where the loc drew up a charter of the working-class family. Other groups included the Jeuneusse Rural Catholique (jrc) and the Jeunesse Indépendante Catholique (jic), primarily for the bourgeoisie. Pierre Juneau, later a Trudeau mandarin before his nomination to the cbc presidency in 1982, recalled that the movements hadn’t been inspired by the church hierarchy but “by the young priests in the newer orders. You had the Holy Cross with the students, the Oblates with the workers and the Clercs St. Viateur with the agricultural people. The

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Jesuits didn’t want to be left out, but they didn’t fit, as they stressed nationalist values more than spiritual and social values.” The origins and model of Catholic Action could be traced to a 1922 papal encyclical, Ubi Arcano, in which Pius XI urged laymen to take a more active role in the affairs of the church by spreading Christian values and principles to the people of their communities. By the mid-1920s, there were some 37,000 of Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne in Belgium alone. By 1931, the movement had spread to North America with the founding, by an Oblate father named Henri Roy, of the first joc chapter in the Montreal parish of St. Alphonse de Youville. “The goal of Catholic Action,” recalled Pierre Juneau, “was the dropping of moralistic and ritualistic concepts in favor of individual values within a spiritual framework.” Catholic Action would prove to be a political and social training ground for the men and women of Juneau’s generation. It produced writers and theorists like Guy Rocher and Fernand Dumont, provided a rational base for sociologists like Maurice Pinard and Soucy Gagné. It encouraged people like the Breton brothers, Albert and Raymond, to go off and study at Columbia and Chicago universities. On the clerical side in Montreal it produced Maurice Lafond of the Holy Cross fathers, who performed the kind of leadership role among the students in Montreal that Père Georges-Henri Lévesque filled at the social sciences faculty at Laval. And there were intellectual men of action like Fernand Cadieux, the founder of the Social Research Group that was the hothouse for Maurice Pinard, Soucy Gagné and Yvan Corbeil, Quebec’s three leading pollsters into the 1980s. “Cadieux was a prophet,” Pinard said in 1980. “He was enormously cultivated, an educator in the fullest sense of the word. He had an enormous influence on an entire generation by the sheer force of his intellect. He wasn’t a technician, he was a creator who ceded his place to others.” On Saturday afternoons in the 1950s, Cadieux would spend hours at the Laurier Barbecue on Outremont in the company of Marc Lalonde and Pierre Trudeau. He would urge them, as Pinard later recalled, to take power in the federal government from a base in Montreal. “We have to pass to action,” Cadieux would insist, and in 1965, they did. Till the end of his life in 1976, Cadieux remained an important adviser to Trudeau. And a Cadieux protegé, Albert Breton, by then an economist at the University of Toronto, would also be a sometime member of the prime minister’s court. (In the 1980s, Breton filled a behind-the-scenes role with the Kent Commission on newspapers before his appointment as a member of the Macdonald Commission on the economy in 1982.)

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And the Catholic Action movements produced an inordinate number of career politicians, such as former federal Liberal cabinet ministers Jeanne and Maurice Sauvé. Gérard Pelletier, later a Trudeau minister and ambassador to France and the United Nations, came to Montreal as a young student in 1939 and served four years as the general secretary of the jec. The student movement in Quebec was a small and intimate place in those days. “It wasn’t difficult to know everyone,” Pelletier recalled. “When I arrived in Montreal with the student movement, the president of the Jeunesse Étudiante of Montreal was Jean Drapeau, and the next year it was Daniel Johnson. So if you were involved in the student movement, you knew those two guys. And I could say, all the others who were there, too. The universities were very small places at that time.” There were Catholic Action movements springing up all over the place. “The bishops of Quebec wanted to coordinate all these movements,” said Jeanne Sauvé, herself a Catholic Action alumna, “and that’s where Ryan came in.” Of Ryan’s stewardship at Catholic Action, there were two very different perceptions. There were those, like Jeanne Sauvé, who perceived him as the intermediary between the bishops and the activists, and there were those who saw him even then as a champion of the individual, a defender of the working man, a genuine reformer in the affairs of the church. On one point, there was later no disagreement: Ryan knew how to organize, and he knew how to foster a consensus. The work of the lay Catholic activists was inspired by the motto of Thomas Aquinas, Voir, Juger, Agir (Observe, Judge, Act). More than a slogan, it was the basis for the intellectual and administrative organization of the movement. Every year, as Sandra Wheaton Dudley noted in her research paper on Catholic Action, the executive of the national body would suggest a theme for the year’s activities. Then Ryan would send representatives to all the dioceses of French Canada to discuss the theme. This was the Voir part of the motto, the period of observation and analysis. In the Juger part, the chosen theme would be analyzed under Ryan’s guidance. Having completed the analysis, the militants would be urged to act, Agir. In organizing all these activities, Ryan broadened his background beyond the East End of Montreal. For he travelled a lot, not just in Quebec but across Canada. With his excellent English, he was in demand for seminars and panels. Even before his Catholic Action days, he was a student activist in the Commonwealth national meetings in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Ryan further broadened his horizons as president of L’Institut Canadienne d’Éducation des Adultes, which made him one of the leading figures in the field.

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Most of all, during the Catholic Action years, he was schooled in the toughest kind of politics, the ecclesiastical kind. So in that formative period of his career, Ryan developed an outlook and a personal discipline. His vantage point, though very much rooted in Quebec, did not make him uninterested in the rest of Canada. That nationalist-federalist perspective would later shape his writing at Le Devoir, and mark his entry into politics at a time when the Liberal party was looking for that third option between separatism and the status quo. As for his working habits, once formed, they seldom varied. “He’s doing in the Liberal party what he’s done all his life,” Pierre Juneau observed in 1980, noting that Ryan spent a lot of time travelling around the province, attending a numbing succession of boring meetings. “He even wrote a book on committees, and how they should meet.” Indeed he did. Published by the adult education institute in 1962, it was called, Les Comités: esprit et méthodes. No mere pamphlet to be picked out of a rack at the back of a church on a Sunday morning, it ran to 252 painstakingly constructed pages. In one chapter, titled “Difficult People in Meetings,” Ryan characterized every type, down to drawing distinctions between the compromiser and the bonne-ententist, which he allowed were from the same family. The mandarins might have laughed at this, but for adults who hadn’t been to graduate school, and hadn’t learned how to run a meeting, it doubtless served a real purpose. There was one final legacy from Ryan’s Catholic Action period, the network of contacts, sources and friends that he would always fall back on, whether he was in journalism or politics. They included clergymen and educators, credit union managers and mayors in every region of the province. They were the people Ryan had come to know in the thirty-five years of his public life before he became a public figure. They started turning up in his leadershp campaign. He would fly into Val d’Or or drive over on the ferry to Lévis, and there would be someone there to meet him. “He knows the population and the instincts of the population better than most journalists,” observed Pierre C. O’Neil, who worked for Le Devoir in Ottawa before becoming Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary and, eventually, director of news and current affairs programming at Radio-Canada. “He has his ear on the track, he knows when the train is coming and at what time.” His fifteen years at Le Devoir may have provided the best clues to the personality and management style of the man. It is interesting to note that only two years after his arrival there in 1962, Ryan had acceded to the publisher’s chair at the Montreal daily, whose influence seemed to be in inverse proportion to its circulation.

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Other, more logical candidates, were somehow passed over in favor of Ryan. One of them was Jean-Marc Léger, a veteran of the Catholic Action movement and later René Lévesque’s delegate general in Brussels. André Laurendeau, the paper’s editor-in-chief, was away cochairing the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, a landmark work that took most of his energies for the remainder of his life. Besides, Ryan was an outsider, and as such conformed to the paper’s tradition of reaching outside its ranks for a boss. Finally, he had the evident backing of Gérard Filion and of the Archdiocese, which in those days still had its word to say on the board of L’Imprimerie Populaire. Ryan fit the bill as a committed Christian activist, and a prudent but progressive-minded person who was well acquainted with the upheaval in the church. When Ryan assumed control of the paper, it was struggling financially, as it always seemed to be in those days. One of his most lasting decisions was his determination to run the paper as a business that paid its own way. He had little use for a foundation known as Les Amis du Devoir, which more or less lapsed during his stewardship of the paper. He liked to point out to people that Le Devoir was not St. Joseph’s Oratory, with its little collection box in corner stores around the city. The paper had to be rationalized as a business, had to show a profit. And before long, under Ryan’s rigorous cost management, it did. Long before other major papers switched to cold type, Ryan junked Le Devoir’s ancient linotype press, paid off the printers and had the paper printed by a modern, outside shop. That single decision may have saved the paper. Ryan became famous for being so close with a buck he practically squeaked. Reporters from all over Quebec soon became familiar with the stories of how he advised journalists going out of town on assignment to stay at the ymca, as he sometimes did when on the road. Or how he once took a group of reporters to dinner as a reward for a job well done at a convention. They dined in style, at a St. Hubert Barbecue. But for all his legendary tight-fistedness, Ryan could be generous on important matters, especially with life’s underdogs. When he bought out his printers at the end of the 1960s, he gave them six month’s severance pay. “I found him rather generous,” Filion said many years later. “It was more that I would have done.” (Ryan never forgot Filion. After his election to the leadership, he took the time to go to Toronto in 1978 to testify as a character witness for Filion in the Marine Industries dredging trial, in which Filion was ultimately acquitted). Early in the 1970s, Ryan moved the paper from its rundown offices on Notre Dame Street to a “new” old building of its own – Le Devoir’s

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headquarters on St. Sacrement Street, in the Old City. Hence Ryan’s sobriquet as the Pope of St. Sacrement Street. He paid for the building in cash, and had it fixed up with government re-issue furniture. Once when Michel Roy tried to convince him of the economies of industrial carpets for the office, Ryan replied, “there will be no wall-to-wall carpets at Le Devoir.” All in all, the Ryan years at Le Devoir were marked by a tendency to keep administrative authority for himself. He always signed the paychecks at the paper, a practice he continued at the Liberal party. In his dealings with a militant journalists’ union, he could be ruthless. For him the welfare of the institution was always more important than the sensitivities of its employees. They could argue about monetary clauses, and he would show them the bottom line, and give where he could in the good years. But the one thing he guarded like a watchdog was the director’s authority to run the paper, and as long as he was there, he never negotiated any of it away. On the ideas side of the paper, he was more inclined to generosity. His ideas might prevail in the end, but he would entertain lively discussions in editorial conferences. In the newsroom, he had a proven record for hiring, if not always keeping, talented reporters and writers, from Jean-V. Dufresne and Gérald Leblanc of one generation, to Claude Lemelin and Lise Bissonette of the next. Somehow, he managed to bring order out of the intellectual anarchy that prevailed at the paper in the 1970s. He weathered a serious challenge to Le Devoir’s well-being when the Parti Québécois, exasperated at its lack of support on St. Sacrement Street, launched its own paper in the mid-1970s. The experiment was a short-lived failure, but for a time, it cut deeply into Le Devoir’s earnings and Ryan never made the mistake of underestimating a rival daily that went after part of his clientele. When he left Le Devoir at the beginning of 1978, it had never been on a sounder financial footing, with a reserve in excess of $1 million. Nor had its prestige ever stood any higher. The paper’s founder, Henri Bourassa, had made his way from politics into journalism. The most illustrious of his successors was now making his way from journalism into politics. Jean-V. Dufresne, while admiring the Liberals’ capacity to accept this “transplant,” also recognized the risks posed by Ryan’s complex personality. “Ryan has always had a mystical side,” Dufresne observed, “as if he was the recipient of a mandate. The fact that he won’t share power is because it poses risks for the execution of his mandate. “It’s the Achilles’ heel of Ryan, and that’s where the whole future of Ryan and the party will be determined.” “I agree he doesn’t delegate,” said Ryan’s ex-chief organizer, Jacques

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Lamoureux, “but it may not be a reluctance to delegate so much as a lack of confidence in people.” Yet those who had the closest working relationships with Ryan in his political years insisted that he was far from authoritarian, and even a good-humored boss. There was a time after the Iranian revolution in 1979 when Ryan was nicknamed the “Ayotollah.” Pierre Pettigrew, his executive assistant, remembered being buzzed by his boss. “The Ayotollah,” Ryan said with a chuckle, “wants to see you.” “With the people around him,” Pettigrew insisted, “he shares everything. When I went to work for him, he said, ‘Nothing is closed to you. Every file in my office is open to you.’ He wants the people around him to know everything he knows, so that when we come to advise him he’s well informed.” Lina Allard, who organized his agenda in those days, saw Ryan “as a guy who is very sympathetic with people he has an affinity for, and to whom he confides important jobs. He’s a bit paternalistic with us but not in the negative sense. He is not hard but he is demanding, and he respects a capacity to work.” But finally it was Pierre Pettigrew who posed the fundamental rhetoric of Ryan’s leadership: “Is he mean-minded and vindictive?” Pettigrew thought not, and could cite instances of Ryan’s magnanimity and generosity of spirit. Political oracle Léon Dion, for one, had written unfavorably of Ryan during the leadership campaign. Yet Dion was one of the first people Ryan went to see the day after his victory, and almost immediately offered him the chairmanship of the party’s constitutional commission. When Dion evidently declined on grounds of wanting to maintain his political objectivity, Ryan informed him he wouldn’t be having time for long Saturday morning chats on the state of the constitution. “He’s not mean, no, but he does have a long memory,” said Gerry Ryan of his brother. “But where do you draw the line between that and mesquinerie? His level of tolerance for opportunists is very low.” He was also known to have a low level of tolerance for those he considered his intellectual inferiors. “My concern,” said Guy Saint-Pierre at a time when Ryan was still riding high, “is that like Trudeau he is so superior to others, and knows it, that he might develop a contempt for them.” Gerry Ryan had a plausible explanation for that. “When he was a student he studied before he spoke,” said the older brother. “And he has no patience for those who speak before studying.” He also had no time for flattery, unless he was the one being flattered. “He’s very susceptible to flattery,” said Lucette St. Amant. “When he says, ‘that’s a good guy,’ it may be someone who has flattered him.” For the rest, as Claude Forget observed, “Ryan is totally

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incapable of flattering the vanities of ordinary mortals. He will say nice things, but it’s always less glittering somehow.” For Thérèse LavoieRoux, it was just that Ryan was incapable of the hypocrisy of politics. “He’s incapable,” she said, “of saying things or behaving in a manner that does not correspond to what he believes. It’s not meanness at all, it’s just the fault of his qualities.” On one aspect of his personality there was general agreement: Claude Ryan was a bit of a gossip. Michel Robert, who even after falling out with Ryan recognized his qualities as a man who was “authentically modest in his tastes,” as well as one who had a meticulous devotion to duty, saw him as occasionally contemptuous. “He always has something bad to say about someone who’s not there,” Robert said. “He’s a big gossip. He sees the bad side of people. The other thing I don’t like is that he preoccupies himself with the personal side of people’s lives, does so and so live with his wife, is he separated, that sort of thing.” Lucette St. Amant, who was fairly close to Ryan in those pre-election days, acknowledged that “the gossipy, mean side of his personality is the side of him that people don’t like.” But that was part of Ryan’s file, going back some thirty years. Ryan had been sued for slander by a social activist named Renée Morin. At the time, Ryan went around telling people she was a communist. The case dragged through the courts for years, with Ryan winning in the Superior Court in 1953 before losing in the Court of Appeal four years later. His defence had always been one of “qualified privilege,” as to Miss Morin’s suitability to be a unesco delegate in 1949. However, the plaintiff eventually demonstrated that Ryan was in a position to give an appraisal on only ten of the seventeen occasions on which he repeated the accusation. For the rest, Justice John McDougall found that it was malicious slander, repeated even after the original charge was brought against Ryan. There was another side to Ryan that disturbed people, and that was his tendency to bring people to their knees. But that was Ryan, and you took him as he was. He saw this side of himself, the streetfighter side, and he offered no apologies. As he said of his later arguments with Jean Chrétien over the organization of the No committee in the referendum campaign: “You have to go for the crotch, eh?”

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9 Non Merci!

For all the talk of Ryan’s ascendancy and dominance of the party, the fact remained that six months after his accession to the leadership, he was still without a seat in the National Assembly, and still without interesting prospects of finding one. It reached the point in November of 1978 that Ryan had to guillotine discussion of the matter in his caucus. Everybody agreed that he should be in the House, but no one was in a hurry to give up his seat for Ryan. Finally, Zoël Saindon, a veteran member from Argenteuil, went to House Leader Gérard D. Lévesque. “Everybody wants to go to heaven,” he told Lévesque, “but nobody wants to die. I’m prepared to die.” Lévesque took this back to Ryan who said he thought Argenteuil, a mixed urban-rural riding of forty-five municipalities northwest of Montreal, would be “an interesting prospect.” So Lévesque set up a meeting between Saindon and Ryan and there ensued a discussion which the leader characterized as “rather painful.” Saindon decided that he wasn’t ready to die politically after all. “If you want to keep the seat, it’s yours,” Ryan told him angrily. “I’m not asking for it, I never asked for anything.” By this time the affair of Ryan’s seat, or his lack of one, assumed overtones of a comic opera. “On a single day,” veteran Quebec correspondent Robert McKenzie reported in The Toronto Star, “two former cabinet ministers from Montreal ridings, Fernand Lalonde and Victor Goldbloom, issued press releases denying they might surrender their seats.”

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To compound Ryan’s embarrassment, his vanquished leadership opponent, Raymond Garneau, was anxious to resign so that he could take up his second career as a business executive. Garneau was enough of a party man to wait for Ryan to find another seat, and thus be spared the embarrassment of running in Garneau’s Quebec City fortress of Jean Talon, where the knives would almost certainly be out for him. But Garneau was not going to wait forever. Finally, in the last week of the legislative session of 1978, the matter was satisfactorily resolved. Saindon would resign after all, Garneau could receive the tributes of the House and go off to his insurance and banking career. Argenteuil turned out to be a good place for Ryan to hang his legislative hat. In the best traditions of a candidate on the hustings, Ryan could even claim Argenteuil as his home riding, for it was here that his mother, Blandine Dorion Ryan, had been born at the turn of the century. Abandoned by her husband in 1928 when Claude Ryan was only three, she was left to raise her boys alone, and at the height of the Depression. The experience may have hardened her as well as her sons, who grew up in the mean streets of East-End Montreal. For them it was a treat to sneak into baseball games at De Lorimier Stadium after the fifth inning, or to be bussed to the Forum to sit in the “Millionaires Section” along Nosebleed Alley, in those years of the 1930s when they were practically giving away tickets for the Canadiens’ games. Half a century later, Blandine Ryan could take a special maternal pride in the attainments of her three sons, one a justice of the superior court, one a mayor of a large Montreal suburb, the other a prominent journalist turned politician. It was not bad for a bunch of kids from Chambly Street. The oldest, Gerry, was a wounded naval serviceman who at Claude’s urging went to McGill law school after the Second World War on the veterans’ college plan. The youngest, Yves, had started out as a cannedgoods salesman, and by his early thirties was mayor of fast-growing Montreal North, a city that he administered so well that during his stewardship it paid off the civic debt and built an imposing new city hall. And then there was the middle brother, whose whole career as a committed Christian activist and newspaper oracle seemed a preparation for what he was doing now in the home county of his mother. For in those palmy days of 1979, Ryan was still very much the man the federalist forces were waiting for. And on April 30, a year and two weeks after his accession to the leadership, he finally arrived as the elected leader of the opposition in the National Assembly.

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On the night of April 30, Ryan waited out the formality of the count for half an hour or so before Radio-Canada declared his election over the pq’s Dr. Charles Roy, an area dentist. The final margin was an impressive 9,000-plus majority. Ryan had 16,600 votes to Roy’s 7,300. He won every municipality in the riding, from Thurso on the banks of the Ottawa River, down to Lachute. “Well, that’s done,” Ryan told his small circle of staff. “I knew we would make it.” Madeleine Ryan came in, she cleaned his glasses and then they were off in one of those ridiculous motorcades, with shortwave radios linking several cars going four blocks in a small town, the town which then had every reason to think it was giving Quebec its next premier. The voters in the country at large seemed to think so, too. Since Ryan arrived on the scene in 1978 as a full-blooded national figure, Pierre Trudeau’s fortunes had been on the wane outside Quebec. There was a sense, and Joe Clark acknowledged “there might be some of that,” that to the extent Ryan was perceived in English Canada as being able to win the referendum, Trudeau was no longer indispensable. Ryan himself did not make much of this suggestion, saying that national elections hinged on much more than the results of a byelection in a provincial legislature. But even as he was talking on his front lawn three days after Argenteuil, Ryan had just waved goodbye to Trudeau. And why had the prime minister come to lunch at 425 St. Joseph Boulevard? Just to congratulate Mr. Ryan, he said. In fact, the federal Liberals, desperate for a break in the home stretch of the 1979 campaign, arranged the meeting so that they could present the image of a common front between the two leaders. Ryan, for once, was more than obliging. He threw his arms around Trudeau, who looked distinctly uncomfortable, bade him farewell with a “good luck, Pierre,” then turned to reporters and chided Clark for his apparent misunderstanding of the importance of self-determination as an underlying issue in the referendum debate. On that sunny May afternoon, Ryan had done everything the feds could have asked, and more. Three weeks later, with the defeated Trudeau on his way out of office, Ryan was at the zenith of his political career. Suddenly he walked in the sunlight, clear of Trudeau’s long shadow. Ryan had become, in the real as well as the legal sense of the term, the undisputed leader of the federalist forces. As for the Lévesque administration, it was experiencing its own problems. With the referendum just around the corner, the government was having to negotiate with the province’s quarter of a million public-sector employees, members of teachers’, hospital workers’ and civil servants’ unions who could be expected to be sympathetic to the government’s cause. But in the negotiations, they held the referendum as a

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hostage, with the gun pointed directly at Lévesque’s head. Despite Lévesque’s sincere protestations that the referendum must be above such sordid business, he caved in to most of the union demands in a contract that both sides might have regretted when it came to be renegotiated in 1982. In the midst of the worst economic downturn in half a century, the government simply decreed a settlement that included temporary wage rollbacks of twenty percent, and reductions in union strength. In mid-1979, Lévesque was also experiencing the difficulties of a founding father with his political party. It came to Quebec for a June convention mostly to do his bidding in the matter of defining sovereignty-association, but the government still had to spell out what it meant by it in a long-delayed white paper. As for Ryan’s performance in the National Assembly, he was proving to be surprisingly adept. In question period, he relied on his own instincts and the advice of seatmate Gérard D. Lévesque, who in his nearly quarter of a century in the place, had seen just about everything. In the fall of 1979, Ryan appeared to be doing just what he had been hired for, defending the federalist option and demolishing the pq thesis. When the government finally came through with its white paper in November, Ryan picked it to pieces in the space of an hour in his office, and then said the whole thing was a “house of cards.” From Ottawa, Prime Minister Joe Clark was staying out of it, denying Lévesque a target and doing his best to remove what he called “irritants” between Ottawa and Quebec. But before many months had passed, the Clark government was out of business, essentially because of poor inventory control – they forgot to count. The fall of the Clark government on December 13, and Pierre Trudeau’s subsequent five-day performance as Hamlet, caused a certain amount of consternation in the Bunker, as the concrete pill-box of a building which housed the premier’s office on the Grande-Allée was derisively known in Quebec. Trudeau did not fit into René Lévesque’s referendum plans. He had delayed everything about the referendum – the white paper, the question, the vote – in the hope the voters of Canada would get rid of Trudeau for him. When they finally obliged on May 22, it appeared all Lévesque’s temporizing had paid off. When the white paper came out in November, it was Opposition Leader Trudeau, in something resembling high dudgeon, who walked out of two French-language interviews because of technical foul-ups. “Merde,” he said, giving up the second time. Those who knew him suspected that what was really bothering him was that the moment had arrived, and it had missed him. Six weeks later, by some seemingly supernatural kind of luck, he was walking into an election campaign with an insur-

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mountable lead of twenty Gallup points. Once again, there was a confluence of events between Ottawa and Quebec, between Trudeau and Lévesque. Two days after Trudeau ended his retirement, Lévesque finally published his mandate question. He had apparently written the final version only the night before. “Non, merci,” Ryan said in the Assembly on the afternoon of December 20. “No thanks, we do not want it.” It was one of his more memorable performances. And with characteristic logic, he tore the question to pieces. “Our conclusion,” Ryan said, “is that the question falls far short of meeting the expectations which had been nourished by the government themselves in the statements of the past few months. The question goes beyond the true meaning of the option of the government. It centers upon the means which is proposed by the government, that is to say the negotiation of a new understanding with the rest of Canada. It has no clear explicit reference to the fundamental objectives of the government, which is sovereignty-association, that is to say political independence or separation on one hand, and economic association, if possible, on the other.” Ryan had his own proposals to make in what would be known as the “Beige Paper,” the constitutional option of his own party. For most of the time, Ryan had taken little part in the work of his constitutional committee, except when the work bogged down. Finally, over the Christmas holidays, he took control of it and wrote the opening and closing chapters himself. Of all the constitutional documents published during the referendum era, the “Beige Paper” was the most comprehensive and coherent. The “Beige Paper” was introduced by Ryan and committee chairman Raynold Langlois at a tumultuous news conference in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel on January 10, 1980, two years to the day after Ryan announced his candidacy for the Liberal leadership. Some 200 reporters filled a salon in the biggest gathering of the media hordes in Montreal since René Lévesque’s momentuous press conference on the morrow of his 1976 victory. While everyone assumed that Ryan had approved the general parameters of the document, nobody suspected that he had done a furious rewrite job and personally written the important statement of principles at the beginning. “They must have produced seven, eight or ten blueprints,” Ryan later recalled. “None was acceptable. They were too theoretical. They were dry, they were not engagé at all. I insisted with them that they should stop trying to write an introduction and they should go into the work of writing the substance of chapters on sharing powers, on institutions. And as soon

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as they started adopting that approach, the work went very well. I said, ‘Let’s reserve that part for the end when we know what kind of blueprint we have in mind.’ “When it came to that,” he continued, “they began again attempting to write something. One day they came to me and they said, ‘You will have to do something.’ I took the opening pages and began writing myself, so I must have written a couple of drafts. We had a lot of redrafting to do on other chapters as well. I was here with three or four colleagues and we worked night and day during the Christmas season.” The “Beige Paper” was a tremendous piece of work, a literary achievement as well as a draft proposal for constitutional realignment. As superficial as the pq’s white paper had been, the “Beige Paper” was, in Ryan’s own appraisal, “a beautifully conceived paper, a very fine document, a model of balance, of equilibrium.” The party’s commitment to Canada was unequivocal, although the paper also proposed a certain realignment of federal-provincial powers, but in conventional ways that had been essentially proposed in other precincts. Reforming the Senate, for example, as a Federal Council with nominees coming from the provinces, was an idea that had been kicked around by the Conservative party in a position paper proposing a House of the Provinces, by the Task Force on Canadian Unity in its proposal for a House of the Federation, by some of the provinces, and even by the Trudeau government in its 1978 paper, “A Time for Action.” So Ryan was really not venturing onto dangerous territory. But there were definite risks involved in publishing the “Beige Paper” before rather than after the referendum. He felt he had to offer something, to give the people a reason for voting. No, for turning a No into a Yes for renewed federalism. In fact, renewed federalism wasn’t on the program, wasn’t part of the mandate question. Instead of being on the defensive for their own option, the pq now appeared to be in a position to attack Ryan’s as not going far enough in proposing additional powers for the provinces. “It’s a gift for us,” said Claude Morin, the father of the referendum, when he ran into Ryan’s executive assistant Pierre Pettigrew in a hotel elevator. As careful as Ryan had been to avoid any claims of special status, he was running nominal risks with some of the other provinces, if some of the premiers didn’t keep their counsel until the referendum. Peter Lougheed, for example, was dead set against the Victoria amending formula, which was endorsed by Ryan as the best achievable means of retaining Quebec’s veto, along with Ontario and any two Atlantic or Western provinces. It was well known that Lougheed was adamantly

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opposed to veto powers for any province, especially Ontario. Even then, he was an advocate of what would later become known as the Vancouver Formula, requiring the consent of any seven provinces adding up to half the population. But Lougheed had the good political sense to stay out of the debate. For the next two months, Ryan took the “Beige Paper” on the road with him. In every region of the province, Liberal activists gathered to discuss it in the run-up to the party’s policy convention February 29 to March 2 in Montreal. In hindsight, it would later be said that the Liberals wasted their energies on the hypothetical question of the “Beige Paper,” while the pq was preparing for the decisive debate on the real question, which would begin on March 4 with the first of thirty-five hours of debate. The pq braintrusters had been lying low over the long winter recess, gathering arguments and preparing speeches for government members. When the session opened, they were more than ready. What began as a debate soon became a rout. “Look, with hindsight,” Ryan said later, “I will admit we made one mistake during that debate. We had prepared our own constitutional position. It was well prepared. We had decided it was not going to be the object of debate in the House or in the referendum campaign for reasons which I think were justified. “But,” he continued, “we had not really prepared for that debate in the House. We thought it would be a debate on the question, and it was a debate on the issues. And we were shorthanded at that time, in the way of arguments. We did not have all the documents to defend the federalist thesis.” Ryan appeared to be the only leading member of his own team who was fully up to the challenge. He was also on the receiving end of some of the intellectual intolerance which seemed to be a specialty of the pq. One Péquiste referred to him as the Lord Durham of the 1980s, Ryan said later. “And frankly, I thought to myself, that’s going to be good stuff for us to use during the campaign. That was good stuff for us. But personally, I was used to it. I was being branded a traitor at Le Devoir, I couldn’t care less.” By Week Two of the debate, there was the beginning of concern in the federalist camp, and by Week Three, after the publication of the first unfavorable poll for the No side, it became something approaching panic. Despite the unfavorable omens of the poll and the disastrous course the debate was following, Ryan remained curiously unperturbed. In fact, as he later admitted, he was hoarding a lot of his themes and arguments for the real campaign. “I had a lot of documentation myself,” he said. “I had not the time to share it with people.

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I was not disposed to throw it to the wolves at that early stage. I kept telling our people we have to reserve that kind of material for the campaign itself.” But he readily admitted that the pq had a big inning in the debate on the question. “The pq succeeded for a while in creating the impression that they had dominated the debate,” Ryan admitted later on, “because they let loose all their ammunition at that premature stage. And I think that in the long run, we were wiser than they were.” If so, it was not apparent at the time.

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10 Yvette

The secretary at the Montreal Forum neatly summarized the general opinion of the idea. “I think you’re nuts,” she told the woman at the other end of the line. Nothing daunted, Diane Fortier wanted to know the cost of renting the Forum. She didn’t want it for a rock concert, or a prayer meeting of Holy Rollers, but for a rally of women supporting the No option, the Yvettes. “It wasn’t organized by crazy ladies,” Louise Robic would say much later, after she had become president of the Quebec Liberals. And they were certainly aware of the risks of trying to fill the Forum, one of the most dangerous high-wire acts in Canadian politics. “We were told,” Robic recalled, “that if we bombed out, it would be the end, the referendum would be lost. But we knew we could get between ten and fifteen thousand people, and the Forum told us that at 10,000, it would look full.” So quite on their own, an ad hoc committee of four women took what turned out to be the most momentous decision of the 1980 referendum. They would go to the Forum, on April 7, Easter Monday, symbolically the day after the Resurrection, which is what the Yvette rally proved to be for the No campaign. It was that rarest of political events, a spontaneous demonstration. It was all in reaction to some comments by Lise Payette, minister responsible for the status of women in the Lévesque government. She was a former talk-show personality at Radio-Canada and was considered pq’s star recruit of the 1976 campaign. She could help the pq where it was weakest, among married women of a certain age. In the

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Lévesque administration, she proved to be a temperamental but talented minister. As consumer affairs minister, she was able to steer an auto insurance bill from controversy at the outset to general acclaim at the time of its adoption. When she would occasionally be caught thinking out loud, notably voicing her low opinion of parliamentary institutions and their inhabitants, she always managed to escape the censure of René Lévesque and his advisers. The operative assumption was that he needed her for the referendum, especially with women. She was expected to play a starring role, second only to Lévesque himself. At one of the pq’s pre-referendum rallies, it was Payette who led the singing of the Yes campaign’s jingle. Before many weeks had passed, it would become clear that the Yes forces were going nowhere, due in no small measure to Payette’s condescending remarks about stereotyped women she called Yvettes, after a character in a schoolbook reader. She was exhorting women to get out of the kitchen, to break free of their confining roles. The women on the other side were a bunch of Yvettes, she said. Claude Ryan had married one. Payette said this on Sunday March 9, and at the time hardly anyone noticed. The only journalist who picked up on her remarks was from Le Devoir, and this was how it came to the attention of Lise Bissonette, then an associate editor of the paper and later to become its editor-inchief. She wrote a savage commentary in the edition of March 11, castigating Payette for her intellectual intolerance. By the next day, the matter had reached the floor of the National Assembly, then beginning the second week of the debate on the referendum question. Rising on a point of privilege Payette tried to explain her remark by quoting from the grade-two reader in question. Yvette, she read, “always finds a way to please her parents. Yesterday at mealtime, she sliced the bread, poured hot water on the tea in the teapot, carried the sugar bowl, the butter dish and the milk pitcher; she also helped serve the roast chicken. After the meal, she happily dried the dishes and swept the carpet. Little Yvette is a very obliging girl.” Payette put down the reader and went on to say that Quebec women deserved a lot of credit, “having been raised as Yvette, to have become something other than Yvette.” And she concluded: “If I hurt anyone by this remark, including the wife of the leader of the opposition, I apologize publicly, because that wasn’t my intention. My intention was to continue, as I have been doing for twenty years, to help the women of Quebec rid themselves of encumbering stereotypes.” For the women and men on the No side, it was a pretty morbid time. Ryan’s Liberals were getting their clock cleaned in the referendum debate. By the close of the three-week debate on March 21, the No side

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was thoroughly demoralized. In Quebec City, a woman named Andrée Richard decided to do something about it. She rented the ballroom of the Château Frontenac for a brunch on Sunday, March 30. Only women would attend. Only women would speak. It was one of those things that give other people ideas. By the time Louise Robic got back to the party’s office in Montreal the next day, it was decided that they would do something there. In no time at all, they sold 2,000 tickets to a coffee and tea party to be held the following Monday evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. By Wednesday, Robic’s people had sold 7,000 tickets when the largest convention hotel in the city had room for only 4,000 people. Clearly, they had to go somewhere else. The question, as Robic said later, was what was available and what was advisable. There were four women in the Gilford Street office on Holy Thursday: Robic, Diane Fortier, Renée Desmarais and Anne Pelletier. They told no one of what they were up to, certainly no men, least of all Ryan and chief organizer Pierre Bibeau. Finally, they came to the conclusion that they had to try for the Forum, that every other place was too small. “We analyzed what it would take to fill the Forum,” Robic said later. Because they were selling tickets at five dollars a head, rather than giving them away, they could be sure that everyone would show up. And because they never sent out more than fifty tickets at one time to one riding, they kept a close count of things. Finally, they decided to go for it. “We thought,” Robic said, “that the impact would be fantastic. Just the name of the Forum would make it a big event.” What nobody realized was how big. Pierre Bibeau, finally informed of what the women were up to, practically fell on his head. “Who did you consult?” he asked them. “We consulted ourselves,” Diane Fortier replied. Bibeau’s senior staff, regional organizers such as Georges Boudreault and Jim McCann, men with long experience in the packing of halls, politely voiced their doubts. Bibeau had one overriding concern as to the difference between 7,000 people at the Queen Elizabeth and 14,000 at the Forum. “Do you think you can fill it?” he asked. They would fill it all right, without giving anything away. By Easter Monday, Diane Fortier was at the Forum with a certified check for $21,000. By early evening, there was a line-up of women stretching four-deep around the Forum. In a building that had seen everything from the Rolling Stones to the Maurice Richard riot, it was probably the most genteel crowd in Forum history. As the women made their way into the building, each was given a long-stemmed red carnation. The Forum was transformed into a huge bed of flowers swaying in the breeze. The twenty-one-piece orchestra of Paul

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Capelli, the type of band that plays black-tie and graduation balls, serenaded the crowd. At centre ice, a knot of journalists simply stood and gaped at the crowd. “It’s my fault,” said Le Devoir’s Lise Bissonette, only half in jest. Long afterwards, serious journalists would try to quantify the social as well as the political significance of the Yvette movement, which pushed in a ripple effect from Montreal to practically every village and town in the province. In Sept-Iles, a fortress of the Péquiste option, there were over 1,000 women for lunch. In Bonaventure county, down on the Gaspé peninsula, there were 1,200. In Sherbrooke, where the armed forces people were reluctant to rent out an armory for a political event, they found that Robic’s people were not shy about picking up the phone and calling the defence minister, Gilles Lamontagne, to get what they wanted. Another 5,000 women turned up there in the Eastern Townships. Before long, there was a Ryan tour and an Yvette tour crisscrossing the province. In all, the Yvette organizers calculated that they brought out some 50,000 women over the course of the spring campaign, most of whom had never attended a political meeting in their lives. “Because they were invited to a metting where there were just women,” Madeleine Ryan suggested later, “because there were no conditions of admission, they sensed that they weren’t at an ordinary political meeting where they could be held up to scrutiny. They went there, and it became for them a way of assuring themselves that they were far from being alone in their opinions. Some women told me afterwards that where they had been afraid to put on their No buttons, they were no longer shy.” Afterward, much was written about the nature of the Yvette movement, some of it purely speculative and some of it highly nonsensical. But the organizers themselves tried to get a handle on this by conducting an attitudinal survey of some 300 women who had been signed up to the Yvette movement. The result, as Lysiane Gagnon was able to inform the readers of her political column in La Presse, was that the Yvettes had a progressive rather than a conservative social outlook. “Many commentators have presumed rather rashly,” she wrote, “that it was the outraged housewives against the career women, that they were social reactionaries, who were totally dissociated from the feminist movement. ... What makes this all the more interesting is that these respondents express very progressive ideas.” As the women polled measured the important things in their lives, their married life came first, children and family second and third, with work in fourth place, and religion arriving in ninth place, after vacations and sporting activities. As the women measured their socio-political priorities, they were in favor of aid to the handicapped and aged

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at home, they were against sexist advertising, in favor of services to rape victims and so on. But in April of 1980, Louise Robic said “They felt a danger to their country.” For in the weeks leading up to the Easter Monday rally at the Forum, there had been a tremendous amount of social pressure building for the Yes option. An iqop survey published on March 16 in Dimanche-Matin indicated the Yes option had taken a slight lead among decided voters. For four years now, at every family reunion since the accession of the pq, women had experienced these political divisions in their homes. The Yvette rallies offered them the chance to express their own opinions. “We probably helped a lot of women come out of their homes,” Diane Fortier observed later, “and a lot of women to come out of themselves.” At the Forum, as at later meetings, women were the only speakers. There were twenty of them onstage that night, from Ryan’s appointments secretary Lina Allard to Commons Speaker Jeanne Sauvé. “If you had told me a week before there would be 15,000 people at the Forum I wouldn’t have believed it,” Allard said later. “If you had told me I would have spoken, I wouldn’t have been there.” For her, there was some element of women and housewives, who had been degraded by some of the more aggressive elements of the feminist movement, getting an opportunity to renew their self-esteem. “A lot of people were revolted by what Payette said,” Allard observed. “For me, emancipation is going to work if you want it to.” For Jeanne Sauvé, a veteran of the political stump, it was another kind of meeting. “When I got out of there,” she said later, “I would never have known that there could exist such a thing as a very feminine meeting. You know, it was beyond my conception, what would a feminine meeting be? A meeting with a lot of women there, or what, what is it? But it was a meeting with a lot of women, which made it a very feminine meeting. But it was sweet, it was soft, there was no hostility, no aggressiveness, they all came there to say, listen, we’ve got an idea, we’ve got an option, this was it. We’re just telling you.” And there was one living link with the pioneer feminists in the person of 84-year-old Thérèse Casgrain, who had been in the battle forty years before to obtain the right for women to vote in Quebec. She told the crowd they might not be important in the eyes of Mme. Payette, but René Lévesque would learn “that even the little cricket’s voice can be heard across the meadow.” And so it went, for nearly three hours, the most extraordinary soirée in the recent history of Canadian politics. “There hasn’t been since the time women got the right to vote an event that was so important,” suggested Andrée Dontigny, a housewife and mother of two from the

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Montreal suburb of Laval. “For many women, it was their first experience at really expressing themselves. Payette, when she said that, she said it not to put women down, but to wake them up. She did, involuntarily, exactly what she set out to do.” Looking around the Forum that night as he stood under an exit, senior Liberal organizer Jim McCann looked as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders. “It’s a boost,” he said, with a glance at the great arena, filled to its farthest corner. “And to be frank, we needed that.” Did they ever. The Ryan Liberals had sailed confidently out to their policy convention on the first Sunday of March, only to go aground a few days later on the shoals of the National Assembly debate on the referendum question. For a while there in mid-March, it looked like they might be shipwrecked. In fact, there were those who maintained that Ryan had set off on the wrong course by unveiling his party’s constitutional option, the so-called “Beige Paper,” when he did in January of 1980. After all, it wasn’t his question that was being answered in the referendum, and as much as he tried to define his option of renewed federalism, there would be needless controversey. For some of the feds, it would go too far in decentralizing and redistributing powers as between the two senior levels of government. For the Péquistes, it obviously wouldn’t go far enough. Moreover, it would take the head off the pq for the obvious shallowness, logical gaps and plain wishful thinking apparent in the government’s white paper on sovereignty-association, La Nouvelle Entente, rather grandly dubbed “A New Deal,” in English, which inspired some digs about Franklin Delano Lévesque. Walking out of Ryan’s news conference, his former Le Devoir colleague Michel Roy foresaw the dangers that lay down the road. “Maybe,” Roy suggested in a passing remark to one reporter, “he doesn’t want to win by too much.” The problem with the “Beige Paper,” in retrospect, was that it consumed too much of the party’s time when it should have been gearing up for the referendum debate. All through January and February, when the public and a good many of their own activists were preoccupied with the surprise winter federal election campaign, Ryan’s people orchestrated an exhaustive series of regional and riding-by-riding consultations on the “Beige Paper,” leading into the full policy convention in Montreal. All the while, the pq braintrust was preparing for the three-week debate, an event that was widely anticipated to be of a crucial nature. What the pq had prepared, through the office of its brilliant House leader, Claude Charron, was a color-coordinated television

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spectacular. Every speech other than Lévesque’s, with the single exception of Jacques Parizeau’s, had been vetted by Charron’s office. Every last one of them had an appeal to some emotional chord, excoriated some federal devil, appealed to some sectional or sectoral interest, or as with Charron’s own contribution, tried to assuage the doubts and fears of a group of voters like Quebec’s senior citizens, who had the usual concerns about losing their pensions if they changed countries. Apart from their strategic advantage, they had a 2 to 1 numerical advantage in the House, giving them a huge advantage in television time, as the rules were finally adopted. On the Liberal side, Ryan, so often accused of intellectual highhandedness, left his members free, as he told them, to speak from their own minds and hearts. For three weeks, it went on before a huge audience of Radio-Quebec and Radio-Canada viewers. For the Ryan forces, it was an acknowledged disaster. “We lost the first inning,” he admitted later, “but what counts is the final score.” The parliamentary rout, and the publication of the first iqop referendum poll, indicating the Yes forces had taken a 38 to 35 lead among decided voters, did not exactly inspire confidence in Ryan as manager of the federalist team. With Easter fast approaching, with the 35-day referendum campaign expected soon after, the Ryan people acknowledged that they had some catching up to do. “The assault was badly planned,” admitted his appointments and policy secretary, Lina Allard, “the mood was never lower.” And never lower than in the late afternoon of Thursday March 27, when the Ryan team, supplemented by a couple of feds, met in the Hampstead room of the Bonaventure Hotel. Looking around the table, chief organizer Pierre Bibeau noticed the people who would play key roles in the coming weeks. They were: chief fundraiser Gilles Hébert, policy adviser Yvan Allaire, Lina Allard and Louise Robic, the ineffable Lucette St. Amant, advertising man Jacques Dussault, Liberal party president Larry Wilson, Léonce Mercier, director-general of the federal Liberals in Quebec, and Eddie Goldenberg, the diminutive and indispensable right-hand man of Jean Chrétien. The meeting would last for more than eight hours. “The debate and the polls have created a climate of concern,” Bibeau began, “and that’s why we’re meeting today.” Afterward, everyone who was there remembered a comical moment that said everything about the predicament the No forces found themselves in. Bibeau held up a big white organization chart, filled out in pencil. Nobody could read it. One of the advertising brainwaves put forward was a print campaign of thirty-six reasons why people should vote no. As if anyone would wade through that much ad copy. For the

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rest, Dussault said his campaign, when it began in April, would understandably be aimed at the undecided voter. They would waste no time reassuring their nervous supporters about their presence. Yvan Allaire made a scholarly presentation as to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two sides. Everyone agreed that they had to find a way to stop the social pressure and momentum building for the Oui, but no one could agree on an approach. The first of the Yvette meetings was coming up that Sunday in Quebec, and Bibeau thought that might make a good beginning. Someone else suggested they needed some prestigious people on the 300-member national committee of Quebecers for the No. “We need people like Guy Lafleur and Gilles Villeneuve,” someone said, “we don’t need any goddamn writers.” Ryan, who had joined the meeting, turned red as a beet, and then burst out laughing. All this time, they were talking their way around the edges of the question that was on everyone’s mind: how to make the most effective but discreet use of Pierre Trudeau. Ryan’s executive assistant, Pierre Pettigrew, suggested that Trudeau must “show his confidence” in the No forces. What they couldn’t agree on was how. At this point, Trudeau was being urged in some quarters to make an address to the country before the writs were issued in Quebec. Others wanted him invited into the campaign full time, as Larry Wilson noted, because “you don’t keep Guy Lafleur on the bench during the Stanley Cup playoffs.” Round and round the discussion went, to no resolution. Finally Chretien’s man, Eddie Goldenberg, piped up. “I’m going back to Ottawa,” he said. “What do I tell them?” He would not tell them much of anything, since it would be left to Trudeau and Ryan to work out the details at their Good Friday meeting in Ottawa the following week. But there was a developing sense not to overplay the Trudeau card. They broke up after midnight without really having settled anything. Ryan had pleaded for a little more self-confidence in their cause and patience to strike at the right time. “We can’t,” he said, “launch the ship before it’s built.” Ten days later, well into the month of April, they were still trying to get people aboard. Ryan’s ship, built according to the blueprints of the enabling legislation, was duly christened Les Québécois pour le Non, at a press launching on April 8, the day after the success of the Yvette rally at the Forum. Jean Chrétien called it a “commiteee of 400 that never met.” Actually, it did meet once, that afternoon in a salon of the Meridien Hotel. From A to Z, there were some impressive names on Ryan’s list of prominenti, none more so that Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, the Dominican monk who had founded the Laval Universi-

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ty School of Social Sciences. In many ways, Georges-Henri Lévesque was considered the true father of the Quiet Revolution, in that he turned out the men who came to power in Quebec in the 1960s. By 1980, still the good-humored monk, the much-honored Father Lévesque was aligned with Ryan. So were most of the business and professional elites, as well as the leadership of the English-speaking minority and ethnic communities. The committee tended however to be a little short on talent from the popular and performing arts, most of whom were on the other side. When asked why No committee member Claude Valade was asked to sing the national anthem at a big campaign rally, a Ryan staffer responded only half in jest: “She’s our artist.” This was the honorary commitee that Quebec Federation of Labor president Louis Laberge, from his perspective with the Yes, would scornfully dismiss as a reactionary coalition. Ryan met with them for what seemed like the longest period of time, delaying the start of his news conference by fully an hour, while tv reporters fighting supper hour deadlines simply stood around and stewed. Instead of having the committee’s manifesto adopted as tabled, Ryan insisted on reading it all the way through. Meanwhile the representatives of the news media who would be with him for the coming six weeks were left to stand outside and make wisecracks about the grotesque buffet motifs that had been designed by the Meridien Hotel. One was a beaver and the other, presumably a representation of a Quebec tourist, had on a Mexican hat. Meanwhile, secretaries scurried about with photocopies of the committee list, which was still being put together. In terms of care for the media and organization of the campaign, it was not a very promising beginning. As someone suggested, maybe “they should turn the whole thing over to the Yvettes.”

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11 Le oui et le non

It was, as René Lévesque said, “as if we had decided to start our campaign in Westmount.” There was Claude Ryan, sitting up front in a chartered DC-9, winging in for a landing in the countryside of the Kingdom of the Saguenay, which on Sunday, April 13, was still covered in snow. Back in the zoo section of the aircraft, reporters wondered why Ryan had chosen to kick off his campaign in Chicoutimi, the regional centre of “le Royaume,” which was the pq’s strongest region in the province. The justice minister, Marc-André Bédard, had been a member of the pq pioneer class of 1970, and had survived the Bourassa landslide of 1973. Not only was Ryan going into the area first, he was inaugurating his campaign in the Georges Vezina arena, capacity 6,000. It had all the possibilities of a disaster, which is exactly what it proved to be. The No organizers had managed to turn out a very respectable crowd of about 3,000 which would have made the event a huge success in a place like the Hotel Chicoutimi. In the drafty old arena, the press corps had hardly got their coats off before they began counting the empty spaces. In their very first rally of the referendum campaign, the No organizers had broken the cardinal rule of advance work: always make sure the hall is too small for your crowd. And then there was the manner in which the meeting unfolded, which established the pattern for the entire campaign. Ryan was about the fifteenth and last speaker, after the area councilmen, mayors, mnas, down to the Union Nationale leader Michel LeMoignan, and federal justice minister Jean Chrétien. Chrétien had flown in on a government

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JetStar on the pretext that he was opening a federal tax centre in nearby Roberval before linking up with Ryan again that evening in Val d’Or on the other side of the province. By the time it came his turn to speak, Chrétien was furious at the way the afternoon had gone. Half the crowd seemed to have drifted out, and he tried to bring them back with a stemwinder. To the suggestion that the feds had no role to play in the campaign, Chrétien riposted that “no sob” was going to stop him from speaking in his native province. Finally, nearly three hours after the meeting had begun, it was Ryan’s turn. He promptly committed the first unforced error of the campaign when, for no good reason, he made a disparaging remark about Marc-André Bédard. It made no sense to launch a gratuitous attack on the justice minister, who was something of a hero in that region. But then, Quebecers were discovering that Ryan could be a man of back-alley, down and dirty rhetoric. Only the previous Wednesday, at a warmup rally in Kamouraska, he had suggested that intergovernmental affairs minister Claude Morin had “gone down on all fours, sucking” for an endorsement from a prominent French socialist leader. When even the parliamentary press crowd thought the metaphor was somewhat explicit, a rather chagrined Ryan told his assistant Pierre Pettigrew that he had another image in mind. “I was thinking more of a mother-child relationship,” he explained, “You know, stop sucking at the mother’s breast.” It would not be the last time Ryan’s rhetoric would get away from him. When a No committee room was vandalized later in the campaign, he accused the Yes forces of resorting to “fascist” tactics, in the textbook sense of the word. And when he referred to the nationalists’ profoundly pessimistic interpretation of Quebec’s history in Canada, he compared the Péquiste intellectuals to the “revisionist historians in the Kremlin.” But that was Ryan, you took him pretty well as he was, and before long it was clear the fundamental issues of the campaign were much more important than any of the players, or anything they might say. The issue, in its simplest and most eloquent terms, was defined by a filling-station operator in the Eastern Townships city of Sherbrooke. One side, the Yes, was offering Quebec. The other side, the No, was offering Quebec and Canada. For him, when he thought about it, the choice was easy. The No was offering more. In terms of constructing the necessary majority, it was a question of building blocks. Or rather, voting blocs. “We were starting with a base of 40 percent,” said Ryan’s chief organizer, Pierre Bibeau. “The pq was starting with 30 percent. So we had to pick up only 10 percent of the remainder.

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Roughly speaking, the No forces began with all of the 20 percent non-francophone vote. They had another rock solid 20 percent of the francophone vote, among the elderly, the bourgeoisie, and the professional and management class. The pq began with the 20 percent of the population who were supporters of outright independence, and began building on that by the softness of their option. All the polls had indicated that roughly 30 percent of the voters supported sovereignty, even if it amounted to the same thing as independence. From there, to sovereignty-association, to a mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association, the pq built to around 40 percent. But in order to take it from there to a majority, Lévesque needed to put still more water in his wine. He began this process with the text of the referendum question itself, which made it clear that any results from the process of what one journalist dubbed “sovereignty-negotiation,” would be submitted to the voters in a second plebiscite. The second referendum was only one of four arguments in the pq’s soft sell to the soft federalist vote. The others were the argument of le bargaining power, for a mandate to seek more powers for Quebec in some kind of revamped Canadian federation. Then would come the second referendum. Then if the voters still wanted to pull back from sovereignty-association, they could still change the government at the next election which had to be held within a year. And after the Trudeau restoration of February 18, the Yes side had another argument: anyway, Trudeau will say no. Therefore, you have nothing to lose by voting yes, and everything to gain in affirming la fierté, the pride, of Quebecers. It was with these arguments with swing voters that the pq began building toward a majority during the three-week televised debate in March. They had another argument going for them. In a word: solidarity. Afterwards, when the recriminations set in, many of René Lévesque’s supporters reproached him for the ambiguous referendum question cloaked in the gradualist strategies of Claude Morin. But the tribute came from a tested adversary. “Morin,” said Jean Chrétien, “tried it the only way it might have worked, inch by inch.” It was conveniently overlooked by the critics that without Lévesque the independence movement wouldn’t have been respectable in Quebec. And that without Morin, the indépendantistes wouldn’t have been in power. Lévesque, with his middle-class instincts and his vote-pulling appeal, made the separatist option appear less radical and less risky. He took an idea that had been dressed in jeans and sweatshirts and put it in a grey flannel suit.

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From the 11 percent of the vote gathered by Pierre Bourgault and the Rassemblement pour L’Indépendance Nationale in 1966, Lévesque took the Parti Québécois to 23 percent of the vote its first time out in 1970, and to 30 percent in the 1973 election. This is where opinions diverged within the pq as to the nature and packaging of their option. After the 1973 election, the pq formed the official opposition in the National Assembly. The Péquistes then had to decide as between two schools of thought: those who argued it was just a matter of time before they took power, and those who thought they had come as far as they could with an undiluted program of independence. Before the voters would take this first step into the unknown of electing the pq, they would want a safety net below. This is where Claude Morin came in. He had been the principal constitutional adviser to four premiers, from Jean Lesage to Robert Bourassa. After he left government service in the early 1970s, he made his way into the pq where he was regarded as a closet federalist just as much as he was viewed as a closet separatist in Liberal circles. It was Morin who devised the referendum strategy that Lévesque sold to a pq convention in 1974. It was the beginning of étapism, Morin’s reversal of the old Chinese proverb: that a journey of a single mile began with a thousand steps. Once Lévesque and Morin had attained power in 1976, it remained for them to put more water in the wine of independence, and then explain what they meant by it. The first task was Lévesque’s. The second fell to Morin. For Lévesque, the option had always been something he felt. He never defined the parameters of it very well. If you asked him to define independence or sovereignty in constitutional or institutional terms, he would refer to that as the “plumbing” that would come later. The things he knew, he knew as a politician, and what could be sold to the voters. He knew they would never go for a Quebec dollar, and so he packaged a monetary union between Quebec and Canada. In the name of pride, he would be asking Quebecers to vote for a country in which they would still have the likeness of the Queen of England on their currency. The man who was asked to sell this preposterous notion, finance minister Jacques Parizeau, knew perfectly well that it was nonsense. He knew perfectly well that a country which did not control its own money supply, or set its own monetary policy, was no country at all. The interest rate crunch in the deep recession of 1981–82 offered an interesting hypothetical case study of the kind of predicament an independent Quebec might have experienced in a monetary union with Canada. Monetary policy was not Morin’s area of expertise. He was a constitutionalist, a man whose idea of heaven, as the joke went along the

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Grande Allée, would be a permanent first ministers’ conference on the constitution. Once Morin’s referendum idea could be put into practice, it remained for him to define what the government meant by a mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association. This he finally did in a white paper that appeared in November, 1979, La Nouvelle Entente. It was notable mostly for its intellectual poverty, and for a rather dangerous amount of political daydreaming. Morin supposed that in the political association to be negotiated with Canada, Quebec, with one-quarter of the people, would have half the power and half the shares in jointly administered crown corporations like Air Canada. To be sure, it was only an opening position, but Morin was never able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction why English-speaking Canada should go for such a bad deal, and at a price of breaking up the country rather than keeping it together. This was the sort of thing Lévesque called the plumbing, the details of which he knew few voters would concern themselves with until they were presented with the bill. He was more concerned with safety nets and insurance policies, and giving people a good feeling, rather than a sense of trepidation about what he was asking them to do. In this sense, the mandate question itself was much more important to Lévesque than Morin’s white paper. The mandate question, Lévesque’s Christmas gift to the voters in December of 1979, ran to 114 words in French and 107 words in the English version. The essence of it was that the Quebec government was seeking exclusive powers to make laws, levy taxes and establish foreign relations, “in other words, sovereignty.” All this, including the economic association with Canada, would be negotiated. And here was Lévesque’s safety net. “No change in political status resulting from these negotiations,” the question continued, “will be effected without approval by the people through another referendum.” To change metaphors, it was part of a double-indemnity insurance policy Lévesque was offering the voters. They could vote Yes now and No later. And then the premier wanted a contagious good feeling about his option, a sense of solidarity. In nearly every speech, the word was on his lips. The meaning of sovereignty-association might be as elusive as the blue smoke rising from Claude Morin’s ever-present pipe. But Lévesque knew what he meant by solidarity. It meant Quebecers, mostly francophone Quebecers, making an historic affirmation of pride in themselves as people. He was asking them for “bargaining power,” so that for once a Quebec premier could go to Ottawa on his feet rather than on his knees. “Quebec, like all societies, is necessarily divided into all kinds of compartments,” he said in a church basement in North-

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End Montreal on April 22, 1980. “It’s perfectly normal, but there are moments in our history, and they don’t come too often, when we have to find solidarity out of those divisions.” Lévesque had more than The Speech going for him. He also had certificates of good conduct, good citizenship that were passed out to any little “Regroupement” that wanted one, whether it was a block in a suburb of Quebec, a bunch of bus drivers on Montreal’s South Shore, or, for all anyone knew, a group of bartenders on the Rue St. Denis. It was a deliberate strategy of raising the social pressure, to create a bandwagon effect in the workplace to bring undecided voters on board. The only problem with this was that many voters had suffered the divisions of the referendum era around the privacy of their family table. Now Lévesque and his organizers were bringing it onto the job. Yes supporters, in faithfully carrying out their instructions to be contagious, were effectively shutting up supporters of the other side. But the adherents of the Yes, with their unremitting pressure, were also putting a lot of people off. By early April, the social pressure had been broken by the big Yvette rallies of women in Quebec and Montreal, which gave birth to a series of meetings around the province. Lévesque’s big mistake, and that of his handlers, was not to recognize that with their little certificates, they had overplayed their hand. Claude Ryan, often vilified as a failed cleric, effectively scorned Lévesque as some kind of “Brother Superior,” handing out certificates of good conduct. Still, Lévesque started his campaign with the certificates and the solidarity pitch on April 17, and stayed with it even when he knew it wasn’t working. A couple of weeks later, when it was clear that the Yes strategy was backfiring, Lévesque was confronted in Hull by reporters who wanted to know why he was not adjusting to the realities of the campaign. “When you see your strategy isn’t working,” he said privately, “there’s no point in changing midstream. It just serves to confuse your own people and to tell your opponents you’re losing.” Even a week into the campaign, when Lévesque was supposed to be carried along by the momentum of the March 1980 debate, it was clear from the premier’s mood that something was wrong. He was nothing if not a man of transparent moods. When things were going poorly for him backstage, he suddenly became a little man with a very big chip on his shoulder. Less than a week into his campaign of serenity and solidarity, Lévesque was taking cheap shots at the owners of the Englishlanguage media as “the number one profiteers in Quebec.” Later on he began to take out his frustrations even on his own audiences. At a big rally in Quebec City, where the crowd was psyched up and welcomed him with a monstrous ovation, Lévesque would have none of it. “All right,” he told the crowd, “that’s enough.”

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Lévesque’s worst moment of the entire campaign came when he went up to the James Bay construction site, 1000 kilometres north of Montreal. Here was the New Quebec, the very symbol of the Quebecer’s capacity to go it alone, the symbol of hydroelectricity synonymous with the pride of Quebecers. Lévesque never had a chance to get wound up on his spiel. The men at the remote LG-3 worksite loudly demanded more beer rations and mixed dormitory privileges, taking the wind completely out of his sails. Instead of listening to the mens’ demands with tolerance and amusement, Lévesque, as noted by radio reporter Bernard St. Laurent, “lectured them about attaching more importance to their beer than their futures.” It quickly turned into that kind of campaign for Lévesque, one in which practically everything that could go wrong, did. There were two other problems for the Yes campaign. It was built entirely around the personality and persona of the premier. More fundamentally, they had less to offer the voters than the other side. The difference in the two campaigns was startlingly clear. The Yes side had Lévesque bumping around the province in an old F-27 leased from Québecair, because it simply wouldn’t do to be chartering from Air Canada. The Ryan campaign, when it was airborne, whisked around the province in his “DC-Non.” But there were several other components of the No campaign. If Ryan was travelling around with the “A” team, the Yvettes formed the “B” team. There was also a “C” team, composed of the likes of Robert Bourassa and others, who spoke to regional meetings around the province. The Lévesque campaign was not without its moments. There was a meeting in an Old Montreal restaurant where he told a group of lawyers backing his option that he was comforted by their support. This was a man who was the son of one lawyer and the father of another. He had been deeply influenced by his father, Gabriel Lévesque, and was immensely proud of his son, one of the outstanding young attorneys of Montreal. And it showed in the way Lévesque spoke that day, in simple, moving terms, with none of the gratuitous attacks that marred so many of his speeches. But even the success of that meeting indicated the divisions Lévesque’s team had created by raising the social pressure. A few days later, Ryan and justice minister Jean Chrétien spoke to a huge cocktail-hour gathering of lawyers for the No, who filled to capacity the main ballroom of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. The countermovement spread throughout the professions. Soon there were doctors and engineers who had organized for the No, and were staging meetings of their own. None of this would have happened if the Yes forces hadn’t decided to raise the social pressure that

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was broken by the Yvettes, the lawyers and other groups of ordinary citizens who effectively shattered the illusion of solidarity that Lévesque had tried to foster. With a week to go before the vote, it was pretty clear that Lévesque had lost. Even the crowds were staying away, and if there was one thing the pq had always been able to turn out, it was an audience. On May 14, the night of Pierre Trudeau’s dramatic speech in Montreal, Lévesque was 100 kilometres down the road in Drummondville, making a listless speech in a half-empty arena. On the bus out of town afterwards, reporters struck off a chorus of C’est fini pour le Oui, their version of C’est parti pour le Oui, the song with which the Yes forces had launched their campaign only a few weeks before. Even Lévesque’s press secretary, Gratia O’Leary, joined in the chorus. A year later in the spring of 1981, near the end of an election campaign with a different outcome, a reporter observed to Lévesque’s chief of staff that the pq had kept its momentum going this time. Jean-Roch Boivin’s rather revealing reply was the “last time, we never had any momentum.” If the issue of the referendum was as clear-cut as that, it was not entirely evident when Boivin and Lévesque climbed into the back of a blue government limousine to begin the referendum campaign on Thursday, April 17. But it was clear to insiders on both sides that the momentum was shifting back to the No forces. As Lévesque and Boivin pulled out of the Bunker, Ryan was just finishing up a news conference down the street at the Château Frontenac with Bourassa, Jean Lesage and Gérard D. Lévesque. It was an important expression of solidarity within the Liberal family, but it had not been easily arranged. Lesage had been in Miami Beach, staying at the Beekman Towers and playing golf at La Gorce, a course with a heavy French-Canadian membership. He was in no hurry to interrupt his spring holiday for Claude Ryan, for whom he had no reservoir of affection. Moreover, Ryan wasn’t even asking—Bourassa was—on Ryan’s behalf. Finally, Lesage was prevailed upon to fly north for the press conference of Liberal leaders past and present. And before they met the press, they met for lunch up the street in a quiet salon of the old Garrison Club, a symbol for generations of the Quebec political establishment. As every conversation did in Quebec in those days, the table talk soon got around to percentage predictions of how the vote would come out. Given the morbid state of morale among No organizers in midApril, the bullish predictions of the Garrison Club were rather surprising. Bourassa thought that if things came together as they should in the next month, they should win “a good 58 to 42.” Lesage called it within a half a point, at 60 to 40 for the No. Former interim leader Gérard D. Lévesque went along with Lesage at 60 to 40. It was Ryan who was

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the most optimistic of all, calling it at 62 to 38. It had been his prediction from the beginning and would remain so until the end, and he was a bit disappointed on May 20 when the No vote couldn’t achieve that final push over 60 percent. (Bitterly disappointed as René Lévesque was, the result may have saved enough legitimacy for the government and enough face for its leader to put off an early election and keep the premier in office. He had told an interviewer from a French newsmagazine that he “wouldn’t be very interested” in continuing as premier if the Yes forces obtained less than 40 percent. At 40.44 percent, he scraped in just over his own bottom line.) The press conference of past and present Liberal chiefs was an important event for the No forces. For it conveyed the notion of solidarity that Lévesque was trying to coopt exclusively for the other side. Also, the joint appearance of Bourassa and Lesage with Ryan might have served as a subtle reminder to some undecided voters that Liberal times were, by and large, good times. To the extent that the Quebec Liberal party felt comfortable with the nationalist outlook, it was on the economic themes of the Lesage and Bourassa years. It was Lesage who had run in 1962 on the slogan of maîtres chez-nous for the nationalization of the hydroelectric companies. It was Bourassa who had promised 100,000 jobs in the 1970 election, and proceeded to fulfill that pledge, at least partially, with the construction of the “project of the century,” at James Bay. In a way, Lesage and Bourassa reminded voters that they could be good Quebecers and good Canadians at the same time. And more prosperous for it. Lesage brought something more to the referendum race – the moral authority of an elder statesman. This was a sufficient cause of concern to Lévesque that he met the National Assembly press corps at noon on the same day. “You’re going to see my ex-boss,” Lévesque said lightheartedly. But the presence of Lesage, even a decade after he renounced politics forever, was not something to be taken lightly. He still had the elegant manners of a great actor, he still had the voice that you would recognize anywhere. And with his blond hair turned a silvery grey, he looked more distinguished than ever. At the Liberal leaders’ joint news conference, the first question came from Normand Girard, dean of the press corps and a veteran of the Lesage era. “Mr. Premier,” he began, and everyone in the room knew to whom he was referring. The salutation brought a smile to Lesage’s face. “Ah, Normand,” he said, “I told them the first question would come from you.” Lesage would also have some kind of impact in the Quebec City area, where he was held in special regard, and not just in the salons of the Grande Allée, but on the balconies of Lowertown as well.

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More than one woman would answer her door in the month of May and find the patron of the Quiet Revolution introducing himself. “Bonjour, Madame,” he would say. “Mon nom est Jean Lesage.” Altogether, Lesage made quite an impression on the campaign, but never more so than on the evening of May 7 in the Quebec convention centre. It was, in every sense, the best meeting of the campaign. In the space of three weeks, the mood of the No supporters had turned from one of fighting a grim battle to a joyous air of victory. The crowd of some 6,000 people filled the hall two hours before the meeting began. Ryan and the other members of his road show were on stage, but the real stars of the evening would be Pierre Trudeau and Jean Lesage. Trudeau, who had flown in from Vancouver, gave an emotional address of the kind he delivered only in Quebec, a city that seemed to bring out the best in him. But for sentimental value and local impact, the evening belonged to Lesage. Following Trudeau to a podium was no enviable task, but Lesage stole the show. He had not spoken in public in ten years, but that made what he had to say all the more interesting. He may have been a bit rusty, but he called on the reserve of a great and gifted orator, and the crowd cheered him on. He could never see the logic of the Yes option, he said. Moreover he was emotionally incapable of supporting it, for to do so would be to “betray not only my conscience, but the country of my birth.” As for the argument that Trudeau was a centralizing devil, Lesage noted that when he had gone to Ottawa in 1945, the central government spent 70 cents on every dollar expended by the two senior levels of government, and today the figures were reversed. How much did Trudeau have left? As if on cue, Trudeau turned out the empty pockets of his trousers. But the news in Lesage’s speech, the 30 seconds that would run on local radio stations all the next day, was his reference to the resignation of his former minister, Eric Kierans, from the board of the Caisse de Dépot et Placement, the huge provincial pension fund, because it was being forced by the government to lend money to crown corporations at a slightly preferred rate. The timing of Kierans’ resignation, in the crunch of the referendum campaign, looked rather suspicious to his old friend and former colleague, René Lévesque. But the point was that the government was playing around with the voter’s pension money. “Mr. Kierans was right,” Lesage thundered. “They’re siphoning off money that belongs to you. You’ve been robbed.” For some in the audience, it seemed Lesage was finally settling accounts for the grief Lévesque caused him in the last couple of years before he finally quit the Liberal party in 1967. It seemed a kind of catharsis for the former premier – he was getting it out at last. Lesage apologized for

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going on so long, but said the warmth and generosity of the crowd had carried him back to a former time. And then he sat down. It was the last major speech of his life. On that very morning, he had evidently been informed that he had cancer. Seven months later he was dead. Pierre Trudeau walked in the winter cold behind his coffin. René Lévesque, who owed everything to Lesage, stayed in Europe on official business. Claude Ryan was the last speaker that night, as he always was during the campaign. It was a position he liked, for it permitted him to summarize the arguments and the situation, something he had been doing all his life. “It was a well established pattern, which suits me,” Ryan said later, “because I’m good at summing things up at the end of a meeting. I’ve done that all my life.” And he noted that he would often have to “redress things that were said by other speakers,” who would become excessive in their attacks on the other side. The problem was, there was no one left to redress the things that were sometimes said by Claude Ryan, who never worked with a text, only from handwritten notes that he would often jot down on his lap during the course of an evening. And sometimes, when he wanted to say the right and generous thing, it came out all wrong. In Quebec, thinking that the debate should be marked by a climate of serenity in the final days, looking ahead to the time when all Quebecers would have to live together again, Ryan invited René Lévesque to accept the inevitable defeat. At this point, there were two weeks left in the campaign. It was an absurd statement, making Ryan look at once naive and arrogant, when his intent had been something else. There was another problem with Ryan’s speaking last: by the time he finished, and more often than not even by the time he started, the television reporters had missed their deadlines. This was not the case with Trudeau’s two prime-time interventions in Quebec and Montreal. Practically as a condition of his appearance, his people insisted that he get on by eight o’clock at those two meetings, so that the French-language tv networks would have their stories prepared and edited by the time they went on the air at 10:30 with Radio-Canada’s “Téléjournal” and the private network’s tva newscast. Not so with Ryan. Day after day, television reporters missed their deadlines, either because Ryan went on too late, or the evening meeting was in a remote location where they could neither feed their stories, nor fly them out in time to get them on the air. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Eventually, many reporters suspected that the No organizers wanted to keep Ryan off the news, since he was already being perceived as a bit of a drag on their potential vote. Actually, it

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was nothing that systematic. It was just Ryan being Ryan, setting the agenda for his audiences rather than for the news media. “I had to make a choice,” Ryan would recall, “whether I was holding the meeting for the people who were there or using them as a pretext to address the entire province. I made the first choice without any hesitation. “I remember at the strategy meetings of the executive,” he continued. “They came up repeatedly in the first two or three weeks with suggestions that we must modify the order of speakers so that I would be accorded time on tv. I would listen to their arguments and at the end I would conclude we’re not going to change the order of speakers for this or that reason.” Moreover, Ryan knew that the rules of balance and fair play would require the television people to put something on their supper hour and late evening newscasts, even if it was footage from earlier in the day. And generally, it was the kind of image Ryan wanted to present, of himself meeting and greeting people, mainstreaming all over the province. He took this to rather extreme lengths on May 6 when he decided to do a bit of door-to-door canvassing in a trailer town at the LG-2 site in James Bay. Off he went to the first house, where there was no one home. At the second house, the woman did not come out, but invited him in. All the time the cameras were rolling, and Ryan’s aides rolled their eyes in despair. But he was unconcerned, perhaps thinking that the normal tv viewer would not find it unusual that there would be no one home in the middle of the afternoon. Besides, the message was getting through. And the message was the non-message, meeting the voters rather than the media. It was the image of the citizen politician, who was above the normal political packaging. Ryan was in fact turning his lack of charisma to his advantage, as he had all his adult life. From start to finish in the referendum campaign, he ran the equivalent of a whistlestop tour in the jet age. What’s more, it worked, not so much because of the Ryan style, but because of the cause he had going for him. Night after night, the meetings would run on too long, but the crowds would stay. The speeches would be interminable, but they would listen, assimilating arguments they could take away with them. And always, without any prompting, the audience would break into O Canada. It would start with some timid voices at the back of the hall, as if it wasn’t done, and then it would carry over to the stage, where the speakers would shuffle hastily to their feet. Fundamentally, whatever he said or did in the spring of 1980, Ryan had a cause going for him. Also, he was not alone. The cousins were with him.

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12 The Cousins

In the afternoon of Wednesday, May 7, Claude Ryan presided over a meeting of his executive committee. Jean Chrétien was also there. In a few hours, they would both be going to the giant Quebec City rally with Pierre Trudeau and Jean Lesage. The reports Ryan received that afternoon, at the No committee office overlooking the Grande Allée in Quebec, were positively glowing. The pointage, or canvassing, was unbelievably good, pointing to a victory in a range as high as 65 percent. Chrétien, the federal delegate on the No committee, agreed things were looking good everywhere but in the Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region and along the North Shore. Ryan was in a relaxed and philosophical mood, showing none of the aggressive traits and insecurity that put so many people off. That afternoon, he was inclined to be generous to everyone. “You make friends as you go along,” Ryan observed with a nod in the direction of the federal justice minister. “I think Mr. Chrétien and I have learned that.” It was not always so. As Chrétien acknowledged in something of an understatement: “There were some very difficult meetings at the beginning.” The first time Chrétien came to see Ryan after the Trudeau restoration, the meeting was bitterly acrimonious on both sides. They met in Ryan’s Montreal office on Gilford Street at the end of the afternoon on March 7. It was just four days after the swearing in of the born-again prime minister and his cabinet. There were extravagant sensitivities on both sides. As generous as Ryan had been to Trudeau after his defeat in 1979, as much as Ryan acknowledged that Trudeau was a better

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man than Joe Clark for prime minister even though the prospect of his return would complicate his own life, Ryan now had to live with the reality of the federal Liberals’ return to office. It meant Ryan had to defend himself from the charge that the feds would be running the show in the referendum, and that his party was only a branch plant of the federal Liberal head office in Ottawa. For his part, Chrétien was anxious to assure a meaningful role for the feds, and for himself, in the coming campaign. As Ryan recalled one of their early discussions, Chrétien suggested the two sides work on an equal basis, égal à égal as it were. Ryan replied that there would be no sovereignty-association in his organization, and he later took up the point with Trudeau at their Good Friday luncheon at 24 Sussex Drive. “He said,” Ryan later recalled, “ ‘I agree you must lead that organization. Your party must be in charge.’ ” Though the composition of the No committee later proved to be inconsequential, Ryan and Chrétien had a blazing row over the position of the federal Liberals on the sixteen-member executive. Ryan would be president and the leaders of all the parties represented in the National Assembly, including Camil Samson of the Democratic Créditistes, would be vice-presidents. Chrétien would be a simple member, along with Conservative representative Claude Dupras (later cochairman of the 1983 Tory leadership convention). “Chrétien wanted to be on a special level,” Ryan said later. “He said I’m the federal minister of justice and I can’t be on the same level as these people.” For his part, Chrétien later replied that “being a vice-president of the No committee was not something I needed for my curriculum vitae ... but we the federal Liberals had twelve ministers, including the prime minister, from Quebec, and we passed for the Christian Democrat Créditistes of Quebec.” That, Ryan said, was when he told Chrétien, “You take it or you don’t.” Chrétien, according to Ryan’s recollection, actually got on his feet and started toward the door before coming back to resume the discussion around Ryan’s small conference table. Chrétien bit his tongue, but he didn’t soon forget the rough nature of the meeting. “I can understand Jimmy Carter a lot better now,” Chrétien told a group of aides in Ottawa a few days later. “He has to deal with the Ayotollah Khomeini and I have to talk to the Ayotollah Ryenni. Everybody has his own burden to carry.” That first meeting between Ryan and Chrétien was entirely unsatisfactory and inconclusive. “It was,” said Chrétien aide and confidant

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Eddie Goldenberg, “like negotiating the shape of the table at the Paris peace talks.” One week later, on March 14, they had another meeting in Ryan’s office. “The atmosphere,” as Goldenberg later noted, “was completely different from one week to the next.” For one thing, there was a raging blizzard in progress, and Chrétien was unable to land his JetStar at Dorval. He flew into the air base at South Shore St. Hubert, had a military driver take him as far as Longueuil, and took the subway the rest of the way to Ryan’s office on the Laurier Métro stop. For another thing, both Chrétien and Ryan had advance word of the iqop poll that would run in the following Sunday edition of Dimanche-Matin, that put the Yes side in front for the first time, 38 to 35. It was enough for Ryan to put aside his concerns about the federal presence in the campaign. Where only the previous week, Ryan had been saying that the issue was between Quebecers and that the Quebec Liberal party was fully capable of acquitting its responsibilities, he was now looking for fuller participation by Ottawa. It was night from day as compared with the previous week, and the only explanation for it was the poll. “Now,” Chrétien told Goldenberg as they walked back across the street to the Laurier Métro, “you know what responsibility is.” At noon on St. Patrick’s Day, Eddie Goldenberg reported back to the first and by far the gloomiest of the Monday luncheon meetings of senior federal aides and officials. Goldenberg called it a “strategy planning group.” More than that, it was the core referendum group of the Trudeau mandarinate which would set the tone in the capital in the next two months. There was Roger Tassé, the deputy minister of justice; Paul Tellier, the former head of the Canadian Unity Information Office that was set up after the accession of the pq to power in 1976 and virtually disbanded by the Clark government in 1979. Tellier, who had been shunted off as deputy minister of Indian and northern affairs, was brought back into the referendum picture by Chrétien and would later become Chrétien’s deputy minister of energy. There was Gérard Veilleux, then the assistant deputy minister of finance, later head of the Federal Provincial Relations Office, and considered a coming man in the federal bureaucracy. There was Claude Lemelin, also with the finance ministry and later Veilleux’s deputy at fpro. Lemelin, a former journalist at Le Devoir under Ryan, was a kind of short Robert Redford, who could dictate a stream of witty and incisive memoranda while pacing back and forth in his finance ministry office in Place Bell Canada. There was Bob Rabinovitch, later deputy communications minister, a

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Lachine boy who had worked his way up in life into the Privy Council Office, effectively the prime minister’s department and the central control of the federal bureaucracy. There was George Anderson from External Affairs and Tommy Shoyama, the former deputy finance minister under Chrétien, who by 1980 had retired to the academic life at University of Victoria. “They wanted him around,” said Goldenberg, “just for the quality of his advice.” With the exception of Shoyama and Anderson, all the men around the table at the justice department on Wellington Street were Quebecers who had a keen awareness not only of the issues in play, but of the touchy sensibilities involved. And all of them had been attracted to the federal public service by Pierre Trudeau and his notions of Quebecers taking their rightful place in the federal administration. “Last Friday,” Goldenberg reported on the second of Chrétien’s two meetings with Ryan, “I saw a changed man. The arrogance was gone. He acknowledged the situation was serious,” and invited full federal participation, but felt that it would be best “outside the umbrella” of the No committee. Ryan was concerned, Goldenberg reported, that Trudeau’s victory in the February 18 election would send the anti-Liberal vote in Quebec into the Yes camp as a form of backlash. Ryan said the pq’s appeal to “bargaining power” was proving to be a very effective argument. Implicitly, the federalists needed to counter that argument with an argument of their own, and the best person to make it would be the only person who could answer it, the prime minister. And there was some discussion of whether Trudeau should make an address to the country before the issuing of the writs, so that the tv time would not count against the No forces allotment, and the networks would not be obliged to offer Lévesque equal time. “Ryan indicated,” Goldenberg reported, “without saying so directly, that the pm should play a central role because of his credibility in Quebec.” Nor, Goldenberg said, was Ryan inclined to minimize the consequences of a Yes vote. He thought, Goldenberg reported, that in the event of a Yes, there was “a 50 percent chance,” the federalists “would lose control of events.” Goldenberg then reported on the touchy discussions of the federal participation in the No committee, on whether the federal Liberals should join as party members or individuals, on whether they should have a joint caucus of the federal and provincial members (this was agreed upon and took place on Holy Thursday, at the Ramada Inn on Sherbrooke Street East in Montreal next door to the Sambo restaurant and across the street from the pyramids of the Olympic Village). There

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was even a discussion as to whether it would be appropriate for the Speakers of the House and the Senate, Jeanne Sauvé and Jean Marchand, to participate in the campaign, as they were clearly itching to do. “Frankly,” Ryan was reported by Goldenberg to have said, “I’m asking myself if the federal parties should be on the committee.” There was no acrimony in this, Ryan insisted, it was merely a question of strategy. And, he might have added, of perception. The federal and provincial Liberal parties had gone their own way back in 1964. On April 26 of that year, the governing council of the Quebec Liberal Federation decided it would be best all around if they formed a fully autonomous Liberal party; best for appearances’ sake, best in organizational terms, and the best way of sparing the Liberal family nasty quarrels over the different constitutional perspectives developing in Ottawa and Quebec. Premier Lesage, present at the general council, concurred in that recommendation. And on July 5, at a general meeting of the Quebec Liberals, the provincial party decided to withdraw from the National Liberal Federation. (At the time, the provincial party’s initials in French were flq, for Féderation Libéral du Québec, which had a rather unfortunate connotation in terms of the activities of the Front de Liberation du Québec, the ragtag terrorist outfit that was then blowing up mailboxes in the Montreal area. In any event, the Quebec Liberals soon became the plq, Parti Libéral du Québec.) As Bob Giguère, the chief organizer in Quebec for the federal Liberals, noted in a memo to Prime Minister Lester Pearson: “The separation was official.” It was probably just as well for both sides, as Giguère ventured in his memorandum to the pm, to “help resolve the conflict of interest that existed between the two wings of the party, many of which were the natural outgrowth of holding office at both the federal and provincial levels.” Moreover, as Giguère noted in that prescient 1964 memo, “A distinct federal organization will allow us to devote our time and resources to federal policies, being no longer inhibited by an organization which devoted its entire energy and money solely to provincial matters.” Looking back on the separation of the two parties, it was an important preliminary in the recruiting by Giguère’s organization of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier as Liberal candidates in the federal election of November, 1965. They were in no way beholden to the Lesage Liberals, and were free to develop their own Quebec policy perspectives in Ottawa. There was the appearance of things as between the federal and Quebec Liberals in organizational and attitudinal terms, and there was the reality of things at the grass roots level, where the organizers and

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members were essentially the same people. In 1980, the federal Liberals counted some 100,000 members and the Quebec Liberals, gearing up for the referendum, had boosted their membership to over 200,000. If you called up the two membership lists from the computers, officials of both parties acknowledged, you would get about an 80 per cent overlap of federal Liberals who belonged to the Quebec party. And in the rural ridings of Quebec, this tendency was even more pronounced. A rouge was a rouge, and neither the old time bleus nor the new bleus, the Péquistes, made any distinction between the two. Neither, for that matter, did many Liberals, especially when the cousins were in power in Ottawa and the Quebec Liberals found themselves out of office in Quebec. So the federal Liberals, restored to power in the late winter of 1980, were not in the same predicament with respect to the referendum as they had been only a couple of months before, obliged to march to Ryan’s tune. Ryan might have been leader of the No forces, but he was still only leader of the opposition in the legislature. Pierre Trudeau was the prime minister, Jean Chrétien was his referendum minister, with all the resources, brains and machinery of the federal government at his command. And he had every intention of using them. The Goldenberg group was but one example. Part of their function, each Monday at noon, was to put together the various federal scenarios in the event of a Yes or No victory. At that first meeting on March 17, Goldenberg reported that if “yesterday’s iqop is accurate, Lévesque is likely to win a narrow victory.” For the feds, it was a chilling prospect, and the Wellington Street group discussed all the implications of it. “For example,” as Goldenberg later noted, “the currency markets the next day would have been in terrible shape. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure that out. But it would take a genius to figure out what to do about it.” Not long after this first meeting, Goldenberg ran into Bank of Canada governor Gerald Bouey, and discussed the problem at some length with him. “There are lots of options,” said the laconic Bouey. “My recommendation is that you’d better win and win big.” From the time of the government’s swearing in on March 3, Chrétien worked full-time on the referendum problem. After hearing from the weekly meeting of his officials, Chrétien would meet at the end of every Monday afternoon with a committee of the Quebec caucus: Dennis Dawson, a Quebec City youngblood; Jean-Claude Malépart; Rémi Bujold, a former Trudeau aide and freshman mp from the Gaspé region; André Maltais from Sept-Iles on the North Shore; Irenée Pelletier from Sherbrooke; Maurice Dupras from the southern Laurentians; Marcel Ostiguy from Ste. Hyacinthe; and Raymond

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Dupont from the riding of Chambly in the provincial pq stronghold of South Shore Montreal. There was one other member of the caucus group, Senator Maurice Lamontagne, the economist, who had been one of the precursors of the Quiet Revolution in the days when he was teaching political science at Laval University in Quebec. Lamontagne was bringing out a book for the referendum, summarizing a lifetime of arguments of how separatism made no economic sense for Quebec. When he died in 1983, he did not receive the credit he deserved for his role in both the Quiet Revolution and making a place for francophones in Ottawa during the Pearson and Trudeau eras. Chrétien would meet with this caucus group to receive a grass-roots update from every region of Quebec, and to receive advice for his Tuesday morning meetings with the Quebec ministers. The referendum committee of Quebec ministers generally met over breakfast at 8 o’clock in the cabinet committee room of the Langevin Block, which housed the Privy Council officials and most of the aides in the Prime Minister’s Office. In the early going, they had two primordial preoccupations, the role that Trudeau would play, and the need to unblock politically sensitive files concerning Quebec. In the beginning, there was earnest advice from some cabinet quarters that Trudeau should go whole-hog in his participation in the campaign, with an early address to the country and extensive participation in the campaign. Trudeau himself argued against massive intervention by himself. “I’ll do it,” he told Chrétien, “but I don’t want to overshadow Ryan.” And fundamentally, as one senior federal official put it, “Trudeau realized that one speech by the pm was worth a thousand speeches by a minister.” Then there were the sensitive files, notably Ottawa’s looming choice of a fighter plane and its prospective loan guarantees to Chrysler Corporation of Windsor, Ontario. On the long delayed choice of a fighter plane, the defence department leaned strongly in favor of the McDonnell Douglas F-18A rather than the F-16 from General Dynamics. What made the choice so touchy was the timing of it, and the fact that the F-16 builder had promised an industrial-benefits package of more than $1.5 billion for Quebec. The Quebec caucus argued convincingly that if the F-18 were indeed chosen, then Quebec would have to receive an enriched benefits package that would be the equivalent of that promised for the F-16. By borrowing here and adding there, the feds were able to bring the F-18 Quebec package up to speed with the F-16. They did so by practically cooking the numbers, as an angry René Lévesque noted, “by federal functionaries who can’t be very proud of their work.” On the $200 million federal loan guarantees to Chrysler,

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Lévesque was able to ask rhetorically, at a meeting of nightshift workers in the United Auto Workers union hall near the General Motors plant at Ste. Thérèse, why it was always Ontario that received the industrial and financial benefits of Confederation. The feds did what they could to fast-track public works and construction projects, as a means of accentuating the federal presence. Chrétien himself flew into Jonquière on April 13, between No rallies in Chicoutimi and Val D’Or, to inaugurate a new tax centre. It was the modern-day equivalent of the bulldozer along the side of a country road during an election. But Chrétien, aware of the tight spending rules governing the referendum campaign, warned his colleagues not to be too loose in their use of government JetStars during the coming weeks. “Make sure,” he said, “that you have a damn good reason to use a government plane.” At the meeting of Quebec ministers on April 8, the day after the Yvette rally in Montreal, there was a discussion as to whether there should be a national unity debate in the Commons, either early or later in the referendum campaign. Still concerned to counter the effects of the color-coordinated Oui debate in Quebec’s National Assembly, the feds decided that if they were going to have a debate at all, they should do it sooner rather than later. They decided to turn the Throne Speech into a debate on the referendum. They would have six days of televised proceedings, with Trudeau leading off the following Tuesday afternoon, the same day Lévesque set May 20 as the day of the vote. In the House, the seating arrangements on the government side were such that Trudeau was surrounded by his Quebec ministers, Chrétien alongside in the front row, Francis Fox and Pierre de Bané off to one side, Pierre Bussières and Charles Lapointe also within easy camera range, along with Yvon Pinard, Marc Lalonde, André Ouellet and Monique Bégin. It was a conspicuous, rather too obvious, display of French Power. So far as that went, Ryan agreed that Ottawa had every right to stage its own little debate since, as he had told Chrétien at their weekly meeting on March 28, the federal government had been tried and convicted in absentia in the National Assembly. Beginning with Trudeau’s remarkable speech of April 15, in which he refuted the arguments for bargaining power, saying No to a Yes, the feds fought back with a vengeance. As in the case of the pq’s strategy, the speakers’ material was put together and vetted in one place and by one person: the Canadian Unity Information Office and its director general, Pierre Lefebvre. There was one notable and rather unfortunate exception – André Ouellet.

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In the House on April 15, Trudeau’s chief Quebec organizer spoke in the evening, a few hours after the prime minister. Because Ouellet was following an historic address, because reporters had a plateful with the pm’s statement, because it was frankly late in the day, nobody paid much attention to what Ouellet said until the transcripts came up the next day, and then the Ouellet speech became the video tape replay of the referendum campaign. It was a blunt, savage, even crude speech. In short, it was what a lot of people expected from André Ouellet, a man of fine intelligence and generally sound political instincts which he sometimes did his best to conceal. “We have made a martyr of Quebec and a villain of Canada,” he said. “And I think that joke has lasted long enough of having us believe that Canada is a dirty word and we must always talk about Quebec. I suggested that this invading propaganda has been the systematic work, of course, of convinced separatists, who have infiltrated everywhere in Quebec ... those separatists have striven hard to spread their philosophy.” So far Ouellet was staying within the bounds of partisan but acceptable rhetoric. Even his reference to Quebec teachers, “who have set young Quebecers against Canada,” was not altogether a distortion of reality. It was also known, as Ouellet stated, that many reporters had separatist sympathies that sometimes influenced their work. But then Ouellet got carried away, as all the stored up grievances of the feds, all the accumulated resentment at being scorned by the Quebec intelligentsia, came pouring forth in a stream of bitter invective. “Those artists overpaid by Radio-Canada,” he said, “who have been whining about this country for years, those union leaders and politicians have enjoyed total freedom in their work of torpedoing Canada unity. There is no doubt that if these people had tried to do this in any other country around the world, they would have been socked, they would have been clubbed, they would have been jailed. More still, in a number of countries, they would have been shot for doing less than they could do in Canada.” Altogether, that was quite a mouthful. The reaction was predictable and immediate. The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa columnist, Geoffrey Stevens, wrote an indignant column that his desk in Toronto summed up with a one-word heading: “Disgusting.” In La Presse, columnist Lysiane Gagnon wrote a scathing open letter to Ouellet. Months later, when the incident had blown over, Ouellet still made no apologies. “My career was strongly influenced by Jean Marchand,” he said in his office one afternoon in the fall of 1980.” And Marchand had a political style that was débardeur, very roughneck. It’s obvious

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not everyone on the team can be a statesman. On a well-balanced team you have to have someone who can go on the ice and into the corners and give a few shots. “A well-balanced team,” he continued, “must be able to address itself to a different clientele.” His clientele, he acknowledged, was the rural milieau and the old Créditiste counties. “My speech,” he said, “was an echo of many opinions within a large segment of Quebec society.” Oddly enough, it was Ryan who stood by Ouellet, appearing on the same platform with him twice afterwards, and going out of his way to say that Ouellet had expressed sincerely held sentiments, even if the choice of words might not have been his own. At the operations level of the federal bureaucracy, there were two key players in the referendum, Pierre Lefebvre of the Canadian Unity Information Office and Richard Dicerni, a brilliant young Montrealer whose strength was translating policy into concepts easily explained and assimilated. Lefebvre, 37 years old in the spring of 1980, was from the inner-city of Montreal, one of those neighborhoods where, as he recalled, he had to fight his way past the English into school. A graduate of Laval’s psychology faculty, he looked more like a mail-order Péquiste than a federalist. He was a lanky college basketball player, who had the face of a Gérald Godin and the beard of a Denis Lazure. He had arrived at the Unity Info Office under Paul Tellier and Claude Lemelin at the height of the separatist panic in 1977, and stayed on after Tellier was transferred out by the Clark government in 1979. By then, Lefebvre himself was in charge, but he didn’t have much left to run. The Conservative government wanted to emphasize the Canada-wide mandate of the unity shop, rather than concentrating almost exclusively on Quebec as Tellier had done under the Liberals. “But they gave us no mandate,” complained one official of the Unity Office. Within Clark’s Office of the Prime Minister, Senator Arthur Tremblay was given the constitutional and unity dossier, but never really got going on it. Tremblay also had a different approach from the Liberals. A former deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs in Quebec, he understood the Péquistes well enough to ignore them. He counselled Clark on a policy of benign neglect of Quebec, of avoiding provocation, giving the pq no federal targets and leaving the field in Quebec to Ryan. Clark followed the advice to the letter, and in the fall of 1979, it was clearly working. The Lévesque administration was never so unpopular, or never so at sea, as when it was denied its familiar Liberal devils in Ottawa.

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All this changed with the election of February 18 and the Trudeau restoration. “Chrétien said, in effect: I’m in charge of the referendum, make me a presentation,” Lefebvre later recalled. Lefebvre and his officials worked up an audio-visual show on three levels of intensity. Immediately Chrétien went for the third-level package, the all-dressed federal pizza. And he told Lefebvre and his people what he had told officials in other departments. “I’ll handle the politics,” he said, “you do the rest.” Which they did. Altogether, by the estimate of their own knowledgeable officials, the feds spent five million dollars on a blaze of radio, television, and newspaper advertising. And that wasn’t counting the cost of the material and human resources. For a start, Lefebvre and Dicerni had an attitudinal poll of Quebecers conducted in the fall of 1979 by Allan Gregg’s Decima Research, the Conservative party’s polling house. The Gregg data confirmed that Canada, the word itself, was magical in the minds of Quebecers, along with their appartenance canadienne and their sense of the North. “The Gregg data confirmed the overall impression to use, number one, Canada,” Dicerni said later; “two, to stress the usefulness and presence of the federal government, and three, the benefits of federalism. “But Canada was the strong selling point, we knew that if we could make the focus of a yes or a no, for or against Canada, then we would win. Our surveys showed that loud and clear. If we could just reinforce the importance of Canada to Quebecers.” If Dicerni and Lefebvre didn’t exactly raid the federal treasury, they had no hesitation in putting their hands in practically every cookie jar in the federal capital. They drew on every departmental budget that could be useful to them. In their advertising campaign, they played on every intellectual argument, and played without hesitation on every emotional chord, every corde sensible, that they perceived in the electorate. They packaged a series of television ads that ran before newscasts, during talk shows and between periods of hockey games. In one six-week period alone, in April and May of 1980, the feds spent, by one highly informed estimate, nearly $3 million in television spots, most of it aimed at the undecided Frenchspeaking voter in Quebec. If you wanted arguments as to the presence of the federal government in Montreal, why you just had to turn on the television between periods of the Stanley Cup playoffs and look at the good works of Transport Canada, which had built and paid for half the

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cost of the Trans-Canada Highway, not to mention thirty-three airports, forty-four ports and the St. Lawrence Seaway. All of which was brought to you courtesy of Canada, in letters that lit up the screen. As for the proprietary sense of the North, they arranged, in the year of the Arctic Centennial, for a teenager in the North West Territories to write a pen pal in Quebec, describing the life of the territory. “I’m a Canadian of the North,” the letter concluded, “and I love my country.” That was not all, the Department of Health and Welfare reminded viewers that they meant pension checks and family allowances checks and New Horizons programs. And the Secretary of State merely went on the air and played the National Anthem, a shorter version of the 84-second hymn produced by the National Film Board that ends with a couple of blond kids kissing. It was evidence of how hard the feds were prepared to fight. Altogether, it was pretty powerful stuff. All of this was quite systematic, and the federal propaganda blitz got under the skin of the Yes forces, who with all the powers and spending limitations of their enabling legislation, were quite helpless to stop the spending of one red cent outside the referendum umbrella. But finally what got under René Lévesque’s skin, as evidence of the diabolical works of the feds, was almost an accident along the way. Near the end of March, at the regular meeting of Quebec ministers, Health Minister Monique Bégin casually mentioned that her department would be sending around a householder preaching against the excesses of alcohol. In fact, Health and Welfare intended to repeat the slogan it had used the previous year: “Non, merci, that says it well.” “Does anybody have any problem with that?” she asked around the table. “It was discussed for about thirty seconds,” Chrétien aide Eddie Goldenberg said later, “and then everybody said go ahead.” By early May, when the householder was to be mailed out with family-allowance and old-age security payments, there was definitely a problem. In the meantime, “Non, merci” had emerged as the principal slogan of the No campaign. The feds appeared to be blundering into the situation. “We tried to stop the goddamn inserts from going out with the checks, which were being sent two weeks early because of a threat of a postal strike,” Goldenberg recalled; “it was too late to stop them.” Chrétien himself later admitted to having “some reservations about that.” Nevertheless, even if it was too late to stop the mailers, Bégin’s department went ahead with a billboard campaign utilizing the same slogan. For René Lévesque, beside himself over the federal interventions, it

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was simply too much. You could always tell when Lévesque was about to go berserk in a speech by the way he rushed out on stage and waved a newspaper clipping or a piece of paper, as he did on May 8 in the Montreal North arena, where he brandished a copy of his pending legal action against the federal government, its advertising agency, the billboard company, and anyone else involved in this dubious affair. As it happened, Lévesque was to lose the case, in which he alleged the feds had violated the umbrella rules of the game. Nevertheless, the incident created a serious difference of opinion within the federalist forces. Solange Chaput-Rolland, never one to understate a problem, said the situation was indecent and accused the feds of staging an “orgy” of publicity. Ryan’s chief organizer Pierre Bibeau bit his tongue in public, but was privately furious about the unnecessarily negative impact of the Non, merci affair at a time when the No forces were on a roll. The last thing they needed was this kind of overkill. “I think Bibeau warned us it wouldn’t help,” said Goldenberg. “I don’t blame him for being angry about that.” But on the whole, the Ryan group and the cousins worked together with a remarkable degree of harmony. Dicerni, for example, was thrown in with Jacques DuSault to coordinate the advertising and publicity campaign. It was DuSault who came up with the slogan of the campaign, the one aimed at critical undecided voters: Plus j’y pense, plus c’est Non. The more I think about it, the more it’s No. DuSault may have deserved a special medal just for working with Ryan, who was always suspicious of admen and all their works. “It must have been difficult,” as Dicerni observed, “to work in an area where your skills are not appreciated.” Dicerni himself worked anonymously, but was considered a hero of the referendum campaign in Ottawa. The federal blitz was basically his design, right down to the “lazy speakers,” the kits of facts and figures, on each of the nine regions of the province, prepared by the Unity Office. Each one indicated how many federal jobs there were in the area, each one answered “affirmations,” by the other side. And the affirmation strategy was filled out by a series of 20 to 60-second radio spots that tackled the fifteen worst criticisms of the federal system. “There was tremendous feedback to this,” Dicerni said later, “much more than to the tv spots, which were basically soft.” But Dicerni, then a 31-year-old Lachine native who had been educated at College Ste. Marie, was not without his own problems of living the referendum. “I knew that the more effective I was in my job,” he said later, “the more I would be contributing to divisions within my home province.” By the fall, he would go on a previously arranged sabbatical at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

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But in the months of April and May, he also played a critical role as a liaison person between the cousins and the hypersensitive Ryan. By the end of March, the cousins had also placed Léonce Mercier, the director general of their Quebec wing, in the No campaign. That meant that the whole federal organization, which had just ridden Trudeau’s coattails to win 74 of 75 federal seats in Quebec, was thrown into the fray. “We’re ready to play second fiddle,” Chrétien had told Ryan at their March 14 meeting, “but not the triangle in the rear.” There remained serious differences of style and approach between Chrétien and Ryan. As much as Chrétien was the professional politician who enjoyed delegating and beging treated as the client of his civil servants, Ryan insisted on seeing and approving everything, and everything had to be written down. It was as if, after his years at Catholic Action and Le Devoir, nothing existed unless it was on paper. The differences of style and substance between the two men were illustrated at their Friday meeting on March 28. Ryan asked Chrétien if he had any objections if he read the draft manifesto of Les Québécois pour le Non. At this point, Richard Dicerni kicked Eddie Goldenberg under the table. Despite their difficulties in working together, there would come a time when Ryan would be grateful to Chrétien. Absent from the terrain, fretful about the way the campaign was unfolding in April, Pierre Trudeau sent a letter to his Quebec caucus colleagues urging them to stress the aspects of the pride of being Canadian. Chrétien not only corrected the prime minister’s impression in a private huddle in the Commons, he did so in public. “Ryan was very embarrassed by what Trudeau said,” Chrétien later observed, “but then he was very happy with what I said. I think he appreciated it.” Chrétien also noted that “Ryan never panicked in the bad moments of the campaign, and neither did I. We didn’t believe we were in trouble, although public opinion did. We knew that once the polarization set in, we would be all right, not based on polls but on political experience.” For his part, Ryan later had no complaints about the role of the cousins in the referendum. And as for Trudeau, he went out of his way to heap extravagant praise on the born-again prime minister. But it did not cut both ways. Ryan was deeply wounded when he attended Trudeau’s Chamber of Commerce speech in Montreal, where the prime minister didn’t even acknowledge his presence at head table. “He didn’t even mention my name,” Ryan later told aides. But it wasn’t, as Trudeau press secretary Patrick Gossage noted, “as if he hasn’t been told.”

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135 A Change in the Order of Things The establishment man. Robert Bourassa, only thirty-six years old but clearly the choice of the Liberal establishment, handily wins the Quebec Liberal leadership on Jan. 17, 1970, defeating Claude Wagner and Pierre Laporte. At left, passing the leadership torch, Jean Lesage, father of the Quiet Revolution; centre, Andrée Bourassa with their son, François. (The Gazette, archives)

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Aboard a city bus, just four days before the 1970 election, Bourassa looks at campaign coverage in The Montreal Star, in which desperate Union Nationale Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand dismisses polls showing him a certain loser and calls the Liberals “puppets of millionaires.”

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October 29, 1973. A great and famous victory, and the beginning of the end. Robert and Andrée Bourassa, with son, François, and daughter, Mimi, are hailed at Liberal headquarters as the Liberals sweep Quebec with 102 out of 110 seats in the National Assembly. The unprecedented sweep inflated expectations for his second mandate. (The Gazette, archives)

Premier Bourassa with René Lévesque before their radio debate in the 1976 campaign. “Quebecers loved René,” Bourassa would later tell Lucien Bouchard at Lévesque’s death in 1987. “And I admired him.” (The Gazette, Tedd Church)

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Just one week before the 1976 election, Bourassa speaks to the Canadian Club of Montreal. In the last days of the campaign, Bourassa expected to lose his own seat in Montreal but still hoped that the separatist bogeyman would scare enough angry Liberals home to re-elect his government. (The Gazette, George Cree)

The winner. Former finance minister Raymond Garneau raises Claude Ryan’s hand after the former newspaper publisher easily wins the Liberal leadership on April 15, 1978. Ryan’s lack of generosity toward his opponent in victory proves a harbinger of his famous sore-winner speech on referendum night in 1980. (The Gazette, archives)

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Uneasy allies. Campaigning for re-election in May 1979, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau drops by Claude Ryan’s house in Outremont. Trudeau will pay another courtesy call on referendum day in 1980, to inform an incredulous Ryan of his intention to move quickly to patriate the Constitution, marking the end of the alliance between two warring intellectuals. (The Gazette, archives)

With Justice Minister Jean Chretien, Trudeau acknowledges the fervent acclaim of thousands at the Paul Sauvé Arena on May 14, 1980, six days before the referendum. Trudeau has just delivered one of the great Canadian speeches of the twentieth century. “Bien sûr que mon nom est Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” he cries. “C’était le nom de mére, voyez-vous?” (The Gazette, Tedd Church)

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Why is this man laughing? Bourassa and Ryan at a party fundraiser six months after Ryan’s defeat in the April 1981 election. “I would rather lose without you than win with you,” Ryan had told Bourassa, blocking his candidacy in the Outremont by-election of November 1980. (The Gazette, James Seeley)

Bourassa redux. Robert Bourassa outside his Montreal office days before formally declaring his candidacy for the Liberal leadership in August 1983. Gone was the carefully coiffed hairdo, the square black glasses, the pinstriped suits, and the everpresent entourage of his earlier premiership. The new Bourassa was, quite simply, himself. (The Gazette, Michael Dugas)

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13 Ryan and Trudeau: Two Hardheads

Perhaps they were never meant to be friends. They were too alike in some respects, too unlike in most others. They had known one another from young adulthood until late in their careers. Occasionally, as in the Quebec referendum of 1980, they had made common cause. More often, as in the constitutional debates that followed, there was a decisive clash of opinions. In the end, all that should have united them divided them, these two hardheads named Pierre Trudeau and Claude Ryan. For they had in common a deep commitment to individual freedoms, and for much of their careers were devoted to constitutional reform, although they espoused different ideas of Canada and Quebec’s place in it. “These are two strong personalities,” observed André Raynauld, a Trudeau appointee to the chairmanship of the Economic Council of Canada and later, as a member of the National Assembly, an early member of the Draft Ryan movement. “Ryan is a provincialist in the good sense of the word. Trudeau is an internationalist, open to the rest of the world.” Later, after he left politics, Raynauld suggested that “Ryan has always detested strong people.” There are definite similarities of character and experience, as both were marked by the absence of their fathers. Trudeau’s mother was widowed when he was 14, Ryan’s mother was abandoned by her husband when Claude was still a toddler. Both, as boys, had serious complexion problems that left them pockmarked. Both married late, Ryan at age 33, Trudeau at 50. Both apparently felt things more deeply than either cared to let on. “Ryan is exactly like Trudeau,” suggested Pierre

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C. O’Neil, who was a reporter at Le Devoir before becoming Trudeau’s press secretary from 1972 to 1974. “Deep down they’re very emotive, and they have that much in common.” Such men are perhaps not meant to get along. Francis Fox, who had worked as a Trudeau aide before entering politics and had more than a passing acquaintance with Ryan, had an uncomplicated version of what stood between them. “It is,” Fox said, “the war of the intellectuals.” They grew up, worlds apart, in the same city. Trudeau was sheltered by the gentle trees of Outremont, studied at his leisure at the best universities, came and went as he pleased for many years afterwards. Ryan grew up on the hot pavements of Montreal, left university before completing his degree and worked, as most people did, for a living. Trudeau’s sense of public service was derived from his noblesse oblige, Ryan’s from his sense of duty. In short, Trudeau was rich. Ryan was poor. Pierre Trudeau, 33 years old when he called on Ryan in Rome in 1952, was much the more worldly of the two. Ryan, though he was then only 27, was much more experienced in the ways of the world. While Trudeau studied at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Paris in the late 1940s, while he dabbled in the occasional cause like the Asbestos strike, Ryan was already a full-fledged man of action. He was not yet 21 years of age when he was named general secretary of Catholic Action. All his youthful energies were devoted to mobilizing adherents in the service of ideas. Along the way, he learned a good deal about the rough and tumble of ecclesiastical politics, an admirable apprenticeship for the tests that awaited him in the secular world. As for the rounding off of Ryan’s education, he now found himself, for the first time in his life, outside the tiny parish of Quebec in the minor basilica that was Canada. He was in the great cathedral that was Rome, studying church history for two years at the Gregorian College. It was here that Trudeau called on Ryan, at the house in which he was staying. They had lunch and afterwards went for a long walk through the streets of the Eternal City. Trudeau evidently struck Ryan as troubled about his faith and worried about his future. “You remind me of the wealthy young man in the gospel,” Ryan said as they walked. “You know what the Lord told him. He should throw away his riches and start living like the rest of us. That’s the only difficulty that stands between you and us. You have this big pile of money you don’t know what to do with. You should get rid of it.” Trudeau said nothing and they continued on their way. They had been introduced in Montreal in 1948 by a mutual friend named Guy Beaugrand-Champagne. He knew Ryan through Catholic

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Action and, later, was a colleague at the Canadian Institute of Adult Education. Ryan saw Beaugrand-Champagne not as “a man of action, but he was very fond of action and he liked to look at the prospects for the future. He would say, ‘there are five or six guys who are going to influence the future of this society,’ and among them he would mention Trudeau and myself. He mentioned Gérard Pelletier and Charles Lussier. He said, ‘I don’t know what the future holds in store for you, but I feel you will have a lot to say.’ He had told me repeatedly that he wanted me to get acquainted with Trudeau. And I went to his mother’s house one afternoon.” And there, in the rambling brick house on McCulloch Avenue, the two young men talked for hours. “It was a discovery for me,” Ryan would say more than thirty years later. “I had never met the man before. He had a very broad culture. He spoke in very broad terms.” Practically from their first meeting, Ryan said he “tried to enlist him in Catholic Action as I would do with anyone at the time.” But Trudeau was never much of a joiner, especially in those days. “He felt,” Ryan said, “he must not be bound by ties to any particular organization. He declined the invitation to join with us. He wanted to pursue his solitary destiny.” Though none of them really knew it at the time, the Catholic Action movements became the training ground for a new generation which would oppose Duplessis in the 1950s and take over the Liberal establishment in the 1960s, ruling into the 1980s. By contemporary standards, they would be considered social workers. In those days, they were Catholic activists who made up a social movement as they went along, a movement reaching into every corner of Quebec society, from the universities to the trade unions. As Catholic Action was neither controlled by the government nor under the thumb of the bishops, it was free of reactionary influences, open to the expression of new ideas. Naturally, most of the best and the brightest of Ryan’s generation flocked to Catholic Action. But Trudeau did not. Nor did Ryan become a part of Trudeau’s small group that launched Cité Libre, the little magazine that became an important intellectual forum in the 1950s. Ryan never wrote in Cité Libre, Pierre Juneau noted many years later. “They wouldn’t have thought of inviting him and he wouldn’t have thought of going there. Ryan always had a suspicion of the kind of Outremont, educated, elegant type of people whom you might call sophisticated.” So it would be fair to call them friendly acquaintances in the 1950s, each more or less aware of the other’s activities, but each in his own orbit. From time to time, during his periodic travels, Trudeau would be

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in touch with Ryan by mail. “Beautiful letters,” Ryan recalled. “I remember one in which he told me he was going around the world looking at the condition of liberty.” Occasionally, their paths would cross at one of those colloques that were a cottage industry in Quebec even in those days. Ryan recalled a meeting of the Canadian Institute of Adult Education, in which he was deeply involved, where Trudeau turned up to give a keynote speech on individual liberties. “It was a beautiful speech,” Ryan said, “but I had to oppose him on that occasion. To him everything stemmed from the authority of the state. I think the theme of the seminar was the role of voluntary organizations in the promotion of freedom. Trudeau said all those voluntary organizations are pressure groups, creatures of the lawmaker. If the lawmaker doesn’t want them to exist, they do not exist. And I remember saying to him, even if the lawmaker doesn’t want them to exist, they do exist prior to any decision by the authority, because they spring from the free will of the people. And by giving them a legal status, the lawmaker only confirms what they have already decided. And we had a profound difference of opinion there. “I represented the popular stream,” Ryan continued. “I had done all my work without the lawmakers or governors having anything to do with it. We had done our work in Catholic Action during the Duplessis era. And we could not care less about Duplessis in those days. We felt we were developing freedom at levels that were unattainable, completely out of reach of M’sieu Duplessis.” Even in those days, then, there were some profound differences between Trudeau and Ryan in their approach to public policy. “They have common convictions with different temperaments,” suggested André Burelle, a soft-spoken former philosophy professor who became Trudeau’s principal speech writer, and the man who drafted the notes which the prime minister committed to memory for his celebrated speeches in the Quebec referendum. “They have a community of thought, but different means of expressing them.” From the early days, Gérard Pelletier knew Trudeau and Ryan better than most, and had always been struck by their common intellectual sources. Pelletier was in Catholic Action and journalism with Ryan, being editor of La Presse when Ryan became publisher of Le Devoir, as he was in public life with Trudeau. “It’s very, very curious,” Pelletier observed. “They are two guys who have the same favorite authors. And rather curiously in literature, one thing that isn’t very known is the English Catholicism of Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton, and rather curiously among all the people I know, the only two guys for whom they were the intellectual masters were Ryan and Trudeau. They were the only two guys who spoke to

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me of them. It was Trudeau who had me read Cardinal Newman and spoke of that with Ryan, who had also read him. So they have common sources. “One thing that has always seemed important to me in the relations between the two men,” Ambassador Pelletier continued, “was that Ryan would like to have been a scholar, and he wasn’t able to because he had no money, and Trudeau had, and I’ve often thought that bothered Ryan a lot. Trudeau was the guy who could do what he couldn’t. And Trudeau has an independent spirit, and Ryan likes very much to dominate the people with whom he works.” So while they may have been nourished by the same intellectual sources, their ways had been set by upbringing and disposition. The street conversation in Rome in 1952 indicates how very far apart they already were. Trudeau might follow the way of the gospel, but he would never renounce his wealth, for it gave him the freedom to be what he was, and do what he did, then as later in life. But it was not until twelve years later that Ryan found himself in a position where he was required to make some comment on Trudeau’s views. In May of 1964, a group of seven Montrealers published what, in English, was rather immodestly called “A Canadian Manifesto.” The French version of the text had the less ringing title of “Pour Une Politique Fonctionnelle.” The French title was much closer to the utilitarian spirit and rather dry tone of the text. What was interesting, and rather daring, about their concept was that amidst the full euphoria of the Quiet Revolution, they decided to press for a renewed emphasis on the Canadian federation. The seven co-authors went on to more practical pursuits. Lawyer Claude Bruneau became an executive of Power Corporation, and in 1983 was named chairman of its insurance company, Imperial Life. Economist Albert Breton, later a professor at the University of Toronto, became an adviser to the prime minister. His brother, Raymond Breton, was a sociologist who also gravitated to the University of Toronto. They were an interesting pair, being Francsaskois, French Canadians from Saskatchewan. Maurice Pinard, later a McGill sociologist, became Quebec’s most respected pollster. In the 1976 election, he predicted the Parti Quebecois would win 70 seats; The pq took 71. In the 1980 referendum, he predicted the No side would win between 57 and 60 percent of the vote, probably closer to 60; the result was 59.56 percent for the No. In the 1981 election, he forecast a pq comeback in the range of 75 to 84 seats; the pq won 80. Yvon Gauthier was a psychoanalyst who was attached at the time to

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St. Justine’s children’s hospital in Montreal. In political terms, he was to remain the most anonymous of the group. The last two would become the most famous. Marc Lalonde would become the prime minister’s principal secretary in the 1960s, health minister and justice minister in the 1970s, energy minister and finance minister in the 1980s. All this time Lalonde was doing the bidding of the seventh member of that obscure group, the most obscure of the obscure, who became the fifteenth prime minister of Canada, law professor Pierre Elliott Trudeau. There were seven members of the group, but as Breton put it, “There was one writer, Pierre.” The manifesto created an immediate sensation, and in the week of its publication in the Montreal papers, it was the subject of a lead editorial in Le Devoir by its recently appointed director, 39-year-old Claude Ryan. At that point, he had been in the newspaper business all of two years, having quit Catholic Action after seventeen years to become an editorialist with the more or less implicit understanding that he could become publisher when the incumbent, Gérard Filion, moved on. Filion kept his promise and, early in 1964, Ryan was installed in the publisher’s chair of Le Devoir, keeping up the tradition that the paper be put in the hands of an outsider to journalism, a tradition that was upheld in 1981 with the long-delayed appointment of Ryan’s own successor, Jean-Louis Roy of McGill’s French Canada Studies Program. Though the “Canadian Manifesto” was written by a committee, Ryan’s critique noted that it “was signed by Pierre-Elliott Trudeau and six other Montreal intellectuals.” And why should Ryan not have suspected that Trudeau was the driving force of the group, since he had stated many of the same arguments in other forums such as Cité Libre? Trudeau was known, for example, to be a scourge of Quebec nationalism, which the Manifesto asserted “distorts one’s vision of reality, prevents one from seeing problems in their true perspective, falsifies solutions and constitutes a classic diversionary tactic for politicians caught by facts.” And then there were the authors’ stated reasons for their attachment to Canada. “We refuse to let ourselves be locked into a constitutional frame smaller than Canada,” wrote the seven-member Committee for Political Realism. “First, there is the juridical and geographical fact called Canada. ... To take it apart would require an enormous expenditure of energy and gain to no proven advantage.” They went on to assert that “the most valid trends today are toward more enlightened humanism, towards various forms of political, social and economic universalism” Canada, they concluded, “is a reproduction on a smaller and simpler

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scale of this universal phenomenon.” It was Trudeau, all right. Ryan was sure enough that he called it “the Trudeau group,” in a generally warm and approving editorial. On the reproach of the Seven to the nationalists, Ryan observed that “the Trudeau group stands up vigorously to this deformation of patriotism. The group reminds us of three elementary truths of good will; first, that politics must be based on the individual, not on a race; second, that politics must be the work of logic and reason, not only facile sentiment; and third, that the most respected modern schools of thought incline towards an open, humanistic view of the world rather than a falling back on frontiers.” “I wrote well in those days,” Ryan said with a laugh when he was shown the clipping many years later. But in 1964, as in later years, Ryan found the Trudeau group “dealt too coldly with the national and cultural realities,” and were “too abstract” in their approach to other policy areas. This would become a running sore between Ryan and Trudeau after his entry into politics the following year. It was at a late Friday afternoon news conference on September 10, 1965, that Trudeau, Pelletier and Jean Marchand confirmed their rumored entry into federal politics at the side of Lester Pearson’s Liberals. While they were reading their statement, Claude Ryan was somewhere in the room, perhaps alone with his thoughts. Ryan would not have been the sort to keep a political rendez-vous of his own as a member of a team. But he did acknowledge that “I was on good terms with Pearson in those years, and Pearson had made approaches to me to see if I was interested in running. But I said at the time there was no prospect of that.” It was not only the prime minister who had been after Ryan to enter federal politics, but one of the most significant if lesser known figures of the era, Fernand Cadieux. Cadieux was a comrade-in-arms for the newspaper editor. When Ryan was general secretary of Catholic Action, Cadieux was national president of the youth wing, Jeunesse Etudiante Catholique. Later on, Cadieux became the intellectual’s intellectual, one of the inspiring forces behind Maurice Pinard’s Social Research Group, which sought to put sociological studies in Quebec on a sound methodological base. Cadieux was also involved behind the scenes with the Manifesto group, urging them on to action. Everyone of Ryan’s and Trudeau’s generation who knew Cadieux spoke of him with a special awe. Ryan remembered him as “a very close friend of all of us. He was a real light, you know.” Until the end of his life, Cadieux remained a special adviser to Trudeau in the Privy Council Office. When he died, in February of 1976, Ryan phoned in his obituary to Le Devoir from Ottawa, where he was attending the Conservative leadership convention. Cadieux’s funeral passed unnoticed by the national press, which had

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other errands that weekend. Among the mourners, the elite of a generation, were the prime minister of Canada and the director of Le Devoir. Afterwards, Trudeau gave Ryan a lift, and for a few minutes they talked as old acquaintances. Back in 1965, Cadieux was pushing all the bright people of that generation in the direction of Ottawa. He leaned very hard on Ryan, telling him Ottawa needed men of action like himself. “I said to Fernand,” Ryan recalled, “he was a very close friend of mine, I said, ‘No, sorry, I have more important work to do here. Nothing will distract me from that work, so you go and work with your friends if you want to.’” So while there is no doubt that Ryan could have been one of Pearson’s bright new boys from Quebec in the class of ’65, he had his own priorities. Besides, he wasn’t the type to go along as a member of a group. Watching Trudeau and the others that day in 1965, it evidently occurred to Ryan that they had made quite a leap from their leanings towards the ndp, to the more pragmatic world of the governing Liberals. It was Trudeau, after all, who had written a scathing essay about Nobel laureate Pearson being the defrocked prince of peace for his acceptance of nuclear weapons on Canadian soil; it was Trudeau who referred to men of his generation who had been seduced by the “rouged face of power.” It was Trudeau who had worked actively in the 1963 campaign of the ndp’s Charles Taylor in the Mount Royal riding where he would run against the same man barely two and a half years later. Ryan thought it was neither impertinent nor irrelevant to point out that the new Liberal triumvirate had missed a rendez-vous with the ndp. “This rendez-vous,” Ryan observed, “would have given hope, without crying from the rooftops, to the ndp’s Quebec leader, Robert Cliche. At the moment it is finding powerful support among the intellectuals and trade unionists, three men who could have contributed a great deal to preparing the way have renounced this idea to join the ranks of the Liberals.” Nor was Ryan persuaded by their rationale for going over to the Liberals. “These three men invoked, the other day, to justify their choice, their desire to save Canada. This argument doesn’t impress me very much. There are a hundred different ways of working for the intelligent achievement of the Canadian hypothesis.” Ryan was quite prescient in sounding the death knell of the ndp’s hopes in Quebec. Cliche was himself buried in the Trudeau landslide of 1968, and in the mid-1980s the party was still waiting to win its first seat in Quebec. “At the time,” Ryan said later, “I still entertained the notion that perhaps the ndp could offer a new way to Canadians.

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These people had been very close to the ndp. And I thought their decision was a real watershed for the ndp. It meant the end of the road for many, many years to come. And I was a bit sad because of that.” But it was just the beginning for Trudeau and his colleagues, who went up to the capital after their elections of November 8, 1965. Within a year, Trudeau was parliamentary secretary to the prime minister. Within two years he was justice minister, and it was in this capacity that he ran afoul of Le Devoir for the first time. In Quebec to address the Canadian Bar Association in September of 1967, the justice minister met the press at a rather tumultuous news conference where he gave his unqualified opinion of Premier Daniel Johnson’s constitutional position, which was summed up by the slogan Egalité ou Indépendance. Trudeau dismissed it as a “huge intellectual joke” and a connerie, a rather rude anatomical reference. For his flippant and rather vulgar remarks, Trudeau wasn’t long in hearing from the director of Le Devoir. “The Pierre Trudeau of the ’50s,” Ryan wrote, “would at least have made the effort to study the same propositions with care. He would not necessarily have espoused them. He would at least have analyzed them and dissected them, in good faith. His conclusion could have been negative: at least it would have been based on a semblance of reason.” In the same editorial, entitled “The Deplorable Attitude of Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” Ryan also referred to his “arrogant intransigence,” and his “detestable tendency to judge from on high and afar problems which he does not understand.” It was about the roughest Ryan ever was on Trudeau, and years later the former editorialist made no apology for it. “That criticism would still apply today,” Ryan said before his defeat in the 1981 election. “I think that’s one of the weaknesses in Trudeau. I think that is one flaw in his temperament, that he’s so prone to logic and he distorts his opponent’s argument and presents it in a way that makes it very easy to dismiss it. But he misses some essential elements of the argument.” By the end of 1967, it was quite apparent that Ryan and Trudeau were not getting on at all. In the early days of the race to succeed Pearson as Liberal leader, Ryan evinced little enthusiasm for the prospect of Trudeau’s candidacy. In Le Devoir’s appraisal of the candidates, Trudeau barely made it to the finals. In the second of three editorials on April 3, 1968, Ryan eliminated eight names from consideration for the paper’s endorsement. That left him with Paul Hellyer, Mitchell Sharp and Trudeau. Ryan was all set to endorse Sharp the next day, but in the meantime the finance minister suddenly and unexpectedly withdrew, throwing his support to Trudeau. Ryan would not do the same. Though he acknowledged that “on an intellectual level, Mr. Trudeau is

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superior to Mr. Hellyer,” Ryan could not overcome his reservations about Trudeau’s constitutional posture and his adamant opposition to the notion that Quebec constituted a distinct society within the Canadian framework. Ryan put it bluntly: “We believe that, on this problem, the rigid and all too frequently negative attitude that Mr. Trudeau espouses reflects badly the thinking of a great number of his fellow Quebecers.” So Ryan went with Hellyer. “I did not feel at the time that Trudeau was ripe to become prime minister. He was not the man to deal with the Quebec problem; I thought we had to throw what little weight we had behind Hellyer’s campaign.” Trudeau may have claimed in later years that he never read Le Devoir, but he was certainly reading it in those days and his close associates acknowledged that he never forgave Ryan for not supporting his favorite son candidacy at the Liberal convention of April 4 to 6, 1968. “I think Trudeau never forgot that,” said André Ouellet, later chief Liberal organizer for Quebec. But Ryan was not finished with Trudeau in 1968. In the Trudeaumania election of June 25, with Ryan’s own brother, Yves, standing for the Conservatives in a Montreal seat, the publisher supported Robert Stanfield’s Conservatives. “That never surprised me,” said Gérard Pelletier, “because Ryan always struck me as a closet Conservative, and he often wrote articles saying it was too bad there wasn’t a Conservative party of Quebec, because there’s a Conservative point of view that has no means of expressing itself. He had a natural sympathy for Stanfield. Ryan had sympathy for the man and for his Conservatism.” And for the Deux Nations proposition put forward by the Tories after their Montmorency think-in of 1967, as opposed to the One Nation product that Trudeau was selling around the country that spring. When the campaign was over, and the inevitable Trudeau sweep was complete, Ryan took a rather more conciliatory view. In a piece entitled “The Beginning of a New Era,” Ryan acknowledged the decisive nature of Trudeau’s mandate and offered his “sincere congratulations” to the victor. “The head of government, without prejudice to the right of dissent which everyone holds in a democracy, has the right to the collaboration of everyone who would make Canada a great country. It would be contemptuous to refuse him that on the morrow of a result like yesterday.” It was an olive branch held out in the direction of Ottawa, an invitation for Trudeau to pick up the phone and come calling. But Trudeau was not about to come calling, for which Ryan, in his turn, never forgave the prime minister. “One day he made a disclosure to me,” said Pelletier, “I was often in

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contact with him, as I was in politics then. He wrote one or two articles on Trudeau that seemed to me to be really stupid. He had the right to disagree, but I found him really mean. And I said to him, why do you become so mean on the subject of Trudeau? He was director of Le Devoir and he said to me, ‘Everyone has come to sit in this office to ask my advice and Trudeau has never come.’ It revealed a few things to me. But Trudeau has never gone to any editorial office to ask advice.” Least of all after the events of October, 1970.

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14 The Heirs of Lord Acton

Long afterwards, everyone agreed that the October Crisis was the worst time between Trudeau and Ryan, the low point of their relationship over thirty-five years. The falling out concerned the famous provisional government plot, and whether Ryan was behind it, and whether Trudeau believed it. It began, innocently enough, around a table in the director’s office of Le Devoir, which was then on Notre Dame Street before it moved to Saint Sacrement. It was October 11, 1970, the day after the kidnapping of Pierre Laporte, a one-time labor reporter at Le Devoir and then labor minister in the Bourassa government. Ryan called an extraordinary Sunday meeting of his editorial board to discuss the escalation of the crisis which had begun the previous Monday with the kidnapping of the British trade representative in Montreal, James Cross, by another cell of the Front de Liberation du Québec. Besides Ryan, the meeting was attended by writers Michel Roy, JeanClaude Leclerc, Vincent Prince and Claude Lemelin. “Laporte’s kidnapping of the previous day had been an abrupt aggravation of the crisis,” Roy recalled a decade later. “Ryan thought it created a grave political situation. One of the things that worried him was that the government of Quebec would be put in trusteeship by the government in Ottawa. One of the other aspects was that maybe Bourassa should reinforce his government somehow.” It was, as Roy, the paper’s future editor-in-chief recalled it, a freewheeling discussion of the kind that occurs all the time in editorial meetings, in which all hypotheses are examined in the formulation of

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editorial policy. Then of course, Ryan always saw himself playing a larger role than that of a newspaper publisher. He saw himself as an intermediary. From his almost daily contacts with Bourassa, Ryan was concerned that the premier was not able to manage the situation. From other sources, the Le Devoir board had indications that Ottawa was preparing a hard line, and from their point of view, the thought of the feds moving in and taking over the management of the crisis was unthinkable in that Quebec would become the marionette of Ottawa. Ryan was fairly intrigued by the idea of Bourassa accepting a few prominent figures into a government of unity. One of the prospective candidates in this hypothetical discussion was Lucien Saulnier, then in his final days as chairman of Montreal’s executive committee. He was Mayor Jean Drapeau’s administrative right-hand man, and he was Ryan’s contact man at City Hall, since even in those days Ryan and Drapeau were hardly on speaking terms. After the meeting, Ryan drove out to Saulnier’s home on suburban Ile Bizard and discussed the idea with him. Saulnier, under a great deal of stress in those early days of the crisis, reacted very negatively. And that should, or could, have been the end of it. But almost immediately, Saulnier informed the superior authorities of his conversation with Ryan. “It was Saulnier,” said Robert Bourassa, “who informed me, in emotional terms, there’s someone who is betraying you, trying to stab you in the back.” Nor did Saulnier stop there, He also informed Marc Lalonde, then Trudeau’s principal secretary and one of the chief crisis managers in the prime minister’s office. A decade later, Lalonde acknowledged that he had been informed “very rapidly” by Saulnier of his conversation. After that, Lalonde said, it became “an affair that developed a momentum of its own.” Even if it was just a talking point, he maintained, “it was a crazy idea. It wasn’t even imaginable as an option. Maybe it was just an error, but it was a double error, a grave error in judgment, to have seriously considered this matter and, secondly to have discussed it with a politician in place. What if he had said, yes. What next?” Lalonde shortly informed Trudeau, who was discussing it with Bourassa, as the former premier recalled it, “by Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest.” “Trudeau was furious on the telephone,” Bourassa said. “He believed it. He thought Ryan was capable of doing that.” Trudeau discussed the so-called plot with Bourassa in the presence of Drapeau the following week in the premier’s office. But by then, Laporte was dead, left in a car trunk on Saturday the 17th, after Trudeau had invoked the War Measures Act in the early hours of the

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16th. One of the key events leading up to the imposition of War Measures was a communiqué put out by Ryan and several other public figures, including René Lévesque and labor leaders Louis Laberge and Marcel Pépin, urging the Bourassa government to negotiate for the release of “political prisoners,” as demanded by the flq. As Ryan later informed his readers, he had received a telephone call from Lévesque at the end of the afternoon on October 14, asking if he would join in the statement. When published the following day, it may have contributed to the appearance that the will to resist the flq demands was collapsing among the intellectual and political leadership of Montreal. Trudeau and his advisers had that to think about in addition to the incomplete reports they were receiving about spreading campus protests. Years later Marc Lalonde acknowledged that the statement put out by Ryan, Lévesque and the others “could have been a factor” in Trudeau invoking the War Measures Act in the sense that “it was a sign of decay of political legitimacy in Quebec. I never believed in the possibility of a putsch. It’s just that it demonstrated a difficult situation. Faced with that situation, with a lack of information, it was a question of not knowing the enemy. Nobody knew, and there was a certain deterioration of the political situation.” As Lalonde said, the provisional government affair developed a momentum of its own. Trudeau evidently believed it, and from there it got whispered around the cocktail circuit in Ottawa. By this time, the distinctions had been blurred between Ryan’s original conversation with Saulnier, and the communiqué put out by the leading public figures. What really blew it up was an unsigned article on the front page of the Toronto Star on Monday, October 26. The story, attributed to “top-level sources,” asserted that “the factor that finally drove the Trudeau government into action was that they became convinced a plan existed to replace the Quebec government of Robert Bourassa.” Neither the sources nor the plotters were named. Nor was the story signed, though it was always attributed to Peter C. Newman, then editor of the paper’s editorial page, who kept up his Ottawa contacts from his days as the paper’s columnist in the capital. “There was a lot of misunderstanding about the thing,” Newman said. “One of the things, one of the misunderstandings was over who wrote it, or why my name wasn’t on it. My name wasn’t on it because I didn’t write it. And it was the usual thing when more than one person writes it.” Newman maintained that at least two other Star reporters checked the story and that “it was written basically at the desk. The other misunderstanding was that I believed it. And I never

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said I believed it. Anyway, the point is that they believed it. What I was reporting was what they believed. And it was true, as it came out later, that they believed it, and that’s all one can say of it.” Asked if Trudeau was his source, Newman said, “No.” Here he may have been protecting his source, since one colleague later claimed that Newman got the story from the prime minister. But that wasn’t the end of it. Three days later, on October 29, The Montreal Star picked up the provisional government plot and ran it under the byline of its respected Quebec editor, Dominique Clift: Federal officials firmly believe that Claude Ryan, editor of Le Devoir, proposed forming a provisional government of public safety to replace a faltering Bourassa government and restore the shattered unity of French Canadians in Quebec. In spite of the denials which he printed in Le Devoir this week, Ryan approached several prominent personalities at the time suggesting that the Bourassa government was in danger of imminent collapse and that various citizens of note should step forward to pick up the pieces and ensure stable government in the province.

Ryan was absolutely livid, and he had every right to be. Clift had not checked the story with him, and here was The Montreal Star running rumors as fact. Ryan was forced to write a detailed narrative explaining the whole story in the next day’s edition of his paper. “Neither with Mr. Lévesque,” he wrote, “nor with Mr. Pépin, nor with Louis Laberge nor with any of the others who signed the joint declaration, at any time have I discussed a plan for a provisional government. Furthermore, none of them mentioned this possibility to me.” Confronted by a scrum of reporters later that day in Ottawa, Trudeau insisted he had “solid information” about a plan to set up a provisional government. Referring to Ryan’s editorial, the prime minister said he understood the director had “made a clean breast of it,” when of course Ryan had done nothing of the sort. Finally, Trudeau paraphrased the celebrated dictum of Lord Acton, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. “What was it that Acton said?,” Trudeau said at the stairwell below his Centre Block office. “Lack of power corrupts and absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely.” It was a cruel, unkind cut. He was quoting, or paraphrasing, one of the two favorite authors of himself and Claude Ryan. Nothing more ever came of the affair, and years later Trudeau’s closest friend, Gérard Pelletier, admitted that “Trudeau jumped much too quickly on the story of the parallel cabinet. And when he quoted Lord Acton, there he was really ... but there was a guy in a difficult situa-

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tion. I understood his impatience, but he went too far because there wasn’t too much to it.” In the October Crisis, Pelletier had come home to live in Montreal and keep his ear to the ground, “because from Ottawa you had a deformed image.” From the moment Pelletier heard the story of the parallel government, he said he dismissed it. While he thought “it wasn’t brilliant of Ryan” to be suggesting that so-and-so be taken into the government, it was a long leap from there “to talk of a parallel government, which I found far-fetched.” The whole problem with that “damn October crisis,” observed Albert Breton years later, “is that Trudeau was too damn close to it.” A few weeks later, in January of 1971, Trudeau received a group of eight intellectuals, Ryan, Guy Rocher and half a dozen others, who had previously called on Premier Bourassa. “It was an icy conversation,” Ryan remembered. “It lasted two hours and I think he wanted to spend as much time with us as Bourassa had two weeks before. It was as if he was resolved we could not say we had been treated lightly.” After that, nearly three years passed before Ryan saw Trudeau again, alone or in a group. Finally, at the end of 1973, the people around Trudeau prevailed upon him to have Ryan for dinner at 24 Sussex. It was obviously an effort, for as Lalonde observed, “you always had to twist Trudeau’s arm to get him to sit down with Ryan.” Finally in the 1974 election, Ryan relented and endorsed Trudeau for the first time. But Trudeau’s opinion of him did not greatly improve. After Bourassa’s defeat in the 1976 election, in which Ryan had endorsed the pq, the outgoing premier received a call from Trudeau who remarked early in the conversation that “Ryan dropped you” in his post-election address to the Montreal Chamber of Commerce. But the succession to Bourassa was another matter. When Ryan’s name began to come up, Trudeau did not express any opposition to the idea. Even though it was unthinkable for the feds to endorse one candidate or another, they could still swing a pretty big stick in the campaign, since the federal and provincial Liberals were essentially the same people at the grass roots level. In this regard, nobody had more clout than Marc Lalonde, Trudeau’s Quebec lieutenant. The feds never intervened against Ryan, and there is a good deal of evidence to support the view that they were backing him, from the establishment crowd in Outremont to the organizers at the grass roots. “Before the ’78 leadership,” Pelletier recalled, “Trudeau said to someone who asked, in my presence, ‘Yes, I think Ryan’s a guy who could beat Lévesque.’” Whatever their personal reservations, Ryan and Trudeau realized in

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the spring of 1978 that they were both on the same side. There was some doubt as to who was the captain of the team. Until the referendum, they knew, they would have to gloss over their differences on the constitutional question. It was the touchstone of both their careers, the one thing they really cared about. It jibed with their ideas of the country, and of Quebec’s place in it. When Ryan published his “Beige Paper” on constitutional revision in January of 1980, Trudeau had to dodge questions as to what he thought of it. This was barely a month before the election that returned him to power. Ryan, for his part, had to keep his peace when Trudeau went rushing off to make constitutional history after the referendum. Those episodes were still to be written when they met at 24 Sussex for a long and much-publicized lunch on a cold May afternoon about a month after Ryan’s accession to the leadership. Trudeau, looking at the possibility of an election in mid-1978, was angry that Ryan had received Conservative Leader Joe Clark for dinner at his house in Montreal only the night before. The dinner had been arranged by Ryan’s friend, Brian Mulroney, as a favor to Clark. When it was over, they walked into the spring evening and the national newscasts, smiles and handshakes all round. It dissipated the impression the feds hoped to create of a common front between Trudeau and Ryan. And it reminded voters in Ontario that with Ryan now in place in Quebec, Trudeau was somewhat less indispensable for the national unity debate. For Ryan was himself a national figure, with national stature, and at the time he was at the peak of his popularity, the preferred leader over Lévesque by a 2 to 1 margin, a rather disconcerting statistic in view of what happened later on. In any event Trudeau was angry with Ryan. “When Clark wants to see you, you invite him to your house,” Trudeau said. “When I want to see you I have to issue an official invitation to come and see me at Sussex.” “Pierre,” Ryan replied. “My house has always been an open house. You’re invited there any time, you don’t even have to let me know. You’re always welcome. I thought you knew that.” Trudeau would avail himself of the invitation the following spring, when he was nearing the end of a losing campaign. It was everything Trudeau’s people could have hoped for. Ryan was becoming a politician: he was doing his friends a favor. And he genuinely thought that Trudeau was the better man to lead the country. Though he remained scrupulously neutral in the campaign, he told his executive assistant, Pierre Pettigrew, that the country needed a man of experience with some credentials in the Western world. “We need a man of international stature,” Ryan told his assistant, “so that Canada can play its full role.”

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After Trudeau’s defeat on May 22, Ryan appeared to stand as the unchallenged leader of the federalist cause. Not only was he the leader in law, according to the enabling legislation for the referendum. But there was now a power vacuum with the defeat of the cousins in Ottawa, and Ryan quickly filled it. Trudeau was relegated to whatever role Ryan would deem appropriate. As for Joe Clark, the youngestever prime minister decided to hold himself above the fray, partly out of strategy and partly out of necessity. By taking some of the irritants out of the Ottawa-Quebec relationship, he wisely denied Lévesque a target. So Ryan could afford to be generous when Trudeau announced his retirement on the morning of November 21. In the National Assembly that afternoon, Ryan rose to propose a motion of thanks to Trudeau for his services to the country. Ryan then launched into a generous and even extravagant tribute to Trudeau, and lashed out at the former prime minister’s critics, including by implication, himself. “There are even those who would sometimes have you believe,” Ryan said, “that Mr. Trudeau’s attachment for Canada translated itself into an unrealistic conception of the future of Quebec and its destiny. If Mr. Trudeau is attached to Canada, it’s because he considers that Canada offers the greatest challenge.” Ryan concluded by expressing the hope that “the qualities of courage, high-mindedness and intelligence that characterize Mr. Trudeau will long be available to his fellow Quebecers and all of Canada.” It was too much for René Lévesque, who in his reply was constrained to remind Ryan that he had endorsed Robert Stanfield in 1968. When he got back to his office, Ryan had a call from Trudeau, and they had a good laugh about the pq being in the position of endorsing a motion praising their sworn adversary, “Lord Elliott.” They agreed to meet a few days later in Montreal, where Ryan was anxious to ascertain how Trudeau planned to carry on as a lame duck leader. “I’m going to stay on until the convention,” Trudeau said. “Then I want it to be very clear,” Ryan replied, “that my dealings will be with you until the end, and no one else, and you can count on me not to be a party to any intrigue.” Ryan later said this was the basis of their continuing relationship. “And I could not have been more pleased at what I did, in view of what happened later.” What happened later was of course the fall of the Clark government in December, and Trudeau’s announcement that he would, after all, run again. For Ryan, it was not a wholly welcome development. For the prospect of a Trudeau restoration would cast a shadow over himself.

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There was also the possibility that with Trudeau back in office after the February 18 election, Quebecers would feel free to vote for the Yes side in the referendum, since they would have the security of Trudeau in Ottawa to say No to the mandate they would have given Lévesque. It was a kind of system of checks and balances which, lacking in the constitution, Quebecers had built into the ballot box. It was not for nothing that Quebecers were fond of recalling the old saying, Bleu à Québec, rouge à Ottawa. Still, Ryan told one of his Liberal members, Hebert Marx, in January, that Trudeau was much the better man to be prime minister. And in his Montreal office on election night, he struck his campaign director, Pierre Bibeau, as being “very happy for Trudeau.” But within a matter of weeks, there was a new set of tensions between the Trudeau and the Ryan Liberals as to the management of the referendum campaign. In the National Assembly over a three-week period in March, Ryan’s Liberals took a beating. With the first polls indicating the pq might pull it off, something approaching panic set in in Ottawa. Trudeau was being urged to make an address to the country, to make a full commitment to the campaign. On Good Friday, he had Ryan up for lunch at 24 Sussex. “Some of the guys are nervous that the campaign is not going well,” Trudeau said. “Well, Claude, is it going well?” Ryan insisted that everything would be all right in the end. Trudeau said he was available and would go where Ryan asked. In the end, the prime minister made only four referendum speeches, one in the House of Commons on April 15, and three in Quebec in the month of May. At two rallies in Quebec and Montreal, they sat beside one another, as comrades-in-arms, at last. But it was to be a short-lived alliance. On referendum day, May 20, Trudeau called on Ryan at his house, and informed him that he was going to move quickly on patriation of the constitution. Ryan said there were a few conditions that had to be met. The very next day, flush with the referendum victory, Trudeau told the Commons that he was going ahead with all deliberate speed. The justice minister, Jean Chrétien, would go across the country and visit the premiers before a first ministers’ meeting at 24 Sussex in early June. This was as Ryan was calling for new elections in Quebec to clarify who was to be the province’s bargaining agent. He was afraid that Trudeau was in a terrible hurry to make history, and equally concerned that he was conferring a new legitimacy upon the Lévesque government. When the September Summit of first ministers failed to strike a constitutional bargain, Trudeau moved ahead in October with a unilater-

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al patriation package, with an entrenched charter of rights. Privately, Ryan was appalled, telling his aides it was “immoral.” Lévesque now had the perfect pretext to put off his election until the spring of 1981, to buy time and hope for the depolarization of Quebec voters. It was not a big gamble. At that point, it was the only chance Lévesque had. As Ryan said himself privately of Trudeau: “He screwed me royally.” After that, and especially after Ryan’s defeat, it was inevitable that the old bitterness would come into their relationship. No one was very surprised at the end of 1982 when Ryan, by now the former Liberal leader, wrote a long piece for his old paper, levelling Trudeau and looking forward to the day when the prime minister would retire. “And the sooner the better,” Ryan concluded, “for Quebec and the country as a whole.” And when Trudeau finally announced his retirement on Leap Year Day, February 29, 1984, Ryan had some parting words in another guest column in his old newspaper. Calling Trudeau’s decision “wise,” Ryan was nonetheless prepared to acknowledge that Trudeau had exercised “exceptional leadership,” but reproached him for his “intransigent vision of Canadian unity” which often found him “opposed to Quebec, when he should have searched by all means to establish meaningful collaboration with Quebec.” Ryan cited the October Crisis and the constitutional struggle as evidence of “the kind of country to which Mr. Trudeau’s conception might logically lead. This kind of country will always be inacceptable to thousands of Quebecers, including many federalists.” Still, Ryan said he would remember Trudeau as a man “of great frankness, exquisite courtesy, and remarkable simplicity.” He had always found Trudeau more agreeable in private than in public, Ryan concluded, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge that the public Mr. Trudeau has dominated the Canadian political scene for the last twenty years.” If nothing else, Ryan had the last word between them, and ended on a grace note.

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15 Elliott: The Favorite Son

The man in the light wool grey suit stood third in line to register his name on the voters’ list for the Quebec referendum. The scrutineers, two Liberal ladies named Delphine Flavelle and Lois Conlon, and a young Péquiste named Christin Côté, failed to take any notice of him. “Your name?” one of them asked without bothering to look up as he came to the head of the line. “Pierre Trudeau,” he replied. One of the startled women asked if he really was who he made himself out to be. Once that was established to everyone’s satisfaction, it was agreed that his occupation should be put down as prime minister of Canada. He then gave his address as 1255 Laird Boulevard, a building where he kept his Mount Royal riding office. “But you don’t live in the riding,” protested the young scrutineer for the Yes campaign. “That’s true,” said Michel Robert, stepping forward as the prime minister’s lawyer. “But he has a domicile here.” While Robert went into the legal niceties, Trudeau amused himself by playing ping-pong for a few minutes with the young Péquiste there in the basement of St. Joseph’s church in the Town of Mount Royal, across the street from his riding office, where they had gone to the trouble of installing a cot in case anyone should care to test his claim of being domiciled in the district. In the end, the case of Trudeau, Pierre, prime minister of Canada, 1255 Laird Boulevard, was decided in his favor by a three-member

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panel in the riding, two Liberals voting to have his name on the list, and a Péquiste abstaining. It was the afternoon of May 2, 1980, and Trudeau had just come, without fanfare or outriders, from a speech downtown at the Chambre de Commerce. It was the second of four interventions he would make in the debate, each of them carefully observed and beautifully crafted. Someday, Trudeau’s referendum texts would define the texture of the times. What was rather extraordinary, that sunny first Friday in May, was that Trudeau should have come home to Montreal as the bornagain prime minister. He had said his farewells to the city in that capacity the previous May 21, when he had gone to the Forum with a relative to watch the Canadiens’ defeat the New York Rangers and win the Stanley Cup. It was the night before the 1979 election, and Trudeau, who would normally have sat in full view of the television cameras behind the Canadiens’ bench, was declared out of bounds to the television producers who were under strict instructions not to give him any free television time in front of as many as fifteen million viewers only twelve hours or so before the polls opened. But Trudeau, as his luck would have it, caught a puck that flew over the boards near the end of the third period. There was a tremendous ovation in his corner of the building and the television director had a camera look in to to see what all the fuss was about. And there, flashing a souvenir puck, was the man who was not supposed to be shown on television that night. Afterwards, his friend and admirer Serge Savard, the Canadiens’ captain, saw to it that he was invited into the victors’ dressing room for a quick television interview and a dousing of champagne. In Quebec, there is a maxim that as the Canadiens go, so goes the Liberal party. It’s nonsense, of course, except in the sense that campaign workers feel better about a spring election when the Canadiens are going well. For the people around Trudeau that night, the events of the evening seemed like a promising omen. But there was no good fortune for Trudeau on the morrow. Twentyfour hours later, he stood in the old Château Laurier in Ottawa, conceding defeat for the first time in his life. In Quebec, where there was a great pride in the favorite son, there was no rejoicing. And there was a momentary sense of dread that the rest of the country had determined to remove him from office at the very time his moral authority was most needed in Quebec during the run-up to the referendum. Those apprehensions proved to be ill-founded. With Trudeau’s defeat, the debate between him and Lévesque became depersonalized and quickly evolved into a discussion of the issue – sovereigntyassociation versus renewed federalism, or Quebec versus Quebec and Canada. It soon developed that with Trudeau and his Quebec ministers

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out of the way, the characteristically aggressive Lévesque was deprived of his usual targets. And in his government’s long awaited white paper on sovereignty-association, he would have to come up with some answers of his own. As prime minister, Joe Clark seemed determined not to provoke the Lévesque administration, and was concerned to remove “irritants,” as he put it, from the federal-provincial process. Over the objections of some members of his own party in Quebec, he put Arthur Tremblay in the Senate. Tremblay, the former deputy minister of education and intergovernmental affairs in Quebec, knew the nuances of politics along the Grande Allée. It was a daring appointment by Clark, and Tremblay soon emerged as his principal constitutional adviser whose advice, for the moment, was to do nothing. It seemed to be working. On November 14, the pq lost another two by-elections, this time in ridings it had previously held. One was the swing riding of Prévost in the Laurentian foothills north of Montreal, where the Liberals swept one community college poll by an astonishing 2 to 1 margin. The other, even more astonishing, result came in from the pq fortress of Maisonneuve in East-End Montreal, where Robert Burns had previously won easily for the pq, even in the wilderness years of 1970 and 1973. It seemed that as long as the Liberals cared to make independence the issue, they could not lose. While Ryan was savoring this latest triumph, Trudeau was struggling to adapt as leader of the opposition. As if there weren’t enough indignities to be suffered, it looked as if the referendum would be won without him. To the extent that he would come into the coming campaign, it would be at Ryan’s beck and call. As Trudeau flew back from Toronto to Ottawa after a convention of Ontario Liberals, he stared out the window for what seemed like the longest time. Some of his staff people who were with him that Tuesday morning were convinced that was when he decided to quit. The next day, November 21, he made it official. The Trudeau era was over. Two days after that, Trudeau came home to Montreal to keep a couple of previous engagements. At l’École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, the business school affiliated with the University of Montreal, Trudeau kept an appointment with a new generation of Quebec students. This was not the kind of campus crowd for which Quebec had been noted during the Bourassa years, and it was not the same Trudeau who had occasionally appeared on campus during his prime ministerial years. He did not feel constrained to defend his stewardship, nor was he asked to. He was asked instead for his ideas, on the referendum, on the pq’s white paper and its assumptions of negotiating “between equals,” and whether, with the passing of “French Power,” young Quebecers should feel any attachment to the federal system. As he

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answered questions for more than an hour, he sounded like a free man. “One of the great things about federalism,” he said, “is the creative tension between the two levels of government. Sometimes it’s a little inconvenient, sometimes it results in little spats you’d prefer to avoid, but there’s always this tension, this negotiation between the two powers ... by nature, there will always be disagreements.” He thought the recommendation of the Pépin-Robarts commission, for a system of partial proportional representation, would ease the regional disparities of party representation in Ottawa, where the Liberals had nothing to show for their 25 percent of the votes in the West, and the Conservatives were chronically weak in Quebec. There might even be some merit, he thought, in looking at the French system and there, he said, “no one can accuse me of trying to replace the Queen by President Trudeau because there’s no more question of that.” Indeed, at that point, there was no more question of Prime Minister Trudeau. The thought that he would no longer be around seemed anguishing for the audience who jammed a place called the Buffet Rizzo near the predominantly Italian suburb of St. Léonard in the northeast end of Montreal. Trudeau sat at a table on the edge of the dance floor, where he was mobbed by successive waves of mothers and daughters, who wanted to touch him, talk to him, and have their pictures taken with him. For many of them, he was the only prime minister they had known as Canadians. For some of them, he was the man who had let them or some close relatives into the country. Trudeau always had a special affinity with minority ethnic audiences, for when he spoke of Canada as a privileged corner of the world, they knew from experience what he was talking about. Whenever he might have muttered about Canadians being a country of bitchers, he never meant them. So when he spoke to them for a few minutes, he seemed to sense their sadness at his leaving. He asked them to please remember that he would always be with them. But when he left, bound for Ottawa in the back seat of his newly leased Pontiac, it seemed he was gone for good. Not three weeks later, fate or fortune intervened to give Trudeau another chance to make history. With the defeat of the Clark government’s macho budget, with the country plunged into a winter campaign in mid-December, Trudeau returned again to Montreal, this time to the seclusion in which to consider his options. He saw mostly friends and family that weekend at the Outremont home of his sister, Suzette Rouleau. To one old friend who asked what he would do, Trudeau said that if he came back, he would win, stay on two or three years as prime minister and then, “do what I want to do.”

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What he wanted for himself then, after he and his party had thought it over a few days, was another kick at the electoral can. He knew that, going in with a twenty-point lead, it would be difficult for him to lose. He knew he had the issue in the Tory budget and its 18-cent gasoline excise tax, which cut across all regions and all income groups. He had another, unspoken issue, in Joe Clark and what the country thought of him, which wasn’t much. So for two months he flew around the country pretending to be interested in gasoline prices and saying next to nothing about the constitution and the referendum, the two things that truly mattered to him then. After his election night welcome to the 1980s, after the restoration, there would be time to talk of those things. But time was on the move after the February 18 election. The day after the Trudeau cabinet was sworn in at Government House, the National Assembly was convened in Quebec to begin the long-awaited 35-hour debate on the referendum question. There was no doubt that Trudeau was presenting a “referendum cabinet.” Jean Chrétien was named justice minister, with particular responsibility for the coming campaign in Quebec. Former Quebec mayor Gilles Lamontagne was made defence minister, and given the touchy assignment of choosing a fighter plane that would not only fly for the Armed Forces, but produce the most industrial benefits for Quebec’s aircraft industry. André Ouellet was back as consumer affairs minister and postmaster-general. The combative Marc Lalonde was in the energy portfolio. Monique Bégin was back as health minister. Francis Fox was named to the cultural hardware and software portfolio of communications and secretary of state. Pierre de Bané from the Lower St. Lawrence, Pierre Bussières and Charles Lapointe from the Quebec region, Don Johnston from English-speaking Montreal, rounded out Trudeau’s Quebec team. In all, there were eleven Quebec ministers, including Trudeau himself. But as events would soon demonstrate, they had little time to enjoy the honors of their victory. The three-week debate in the National Assembly soon became a rout. Even before the debate was concluded, the first poll of the campaign published in Montreal’s Dimanche-Matin on March 16 indicated a pronounced swing to the Yes option. It wasn’t long before the Ryan forces were wondering how to recoup, before the feds were wondering how they could usefully be of assistance without appearing to take over the No campaign. They had one big ace in the hole: the Trudeau card. The question was how, and when, to play it. “We wanted to maximize his impact,” Chrétien said later. “At the same time we did not want to overshadow Ryan too much. I think we managed.” That was how it came out in the end.

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It became a question of what he would say and when he would say it. From Paris came his closest intellectual confidant, Gérard Pelletier, for “one long conversation,” as the ambassador put it, in which they went over the touchnotes of what Trudeau would say. He would belittle the pq for its lack of courage in posing such an ambiguous question. As to the vaunted “bargaining power” of the Yes, he would state from the outset the impossibility of negotiations. Then he would ask René Lévesque what he would do in the event of a No. Finally, there would be the pride of Canada, the pride of les Canadiens, and the pride of Quebecers in Trudeau, which would be stated by the simple fact of his showing up. In the prime minister’s office, Trudeau drew to himself a close circle of four advisers. There was Patrick McDonald, originally one of Pelletier’s recruits. There was DeMontigny Marchand, a former Trudeau aide who had gone on briefly to work in the Pelletier embassy in Paris during the Clark administration but was now back as undersecretary of state. There was Claude Morin, not to be confused with the other Claude Morin, a 35-year-old former executive assistant to Francis Fox. Morin was the systems man of the group, in charge of pulling together clippings and documentation and overseeing the details of Trudeau’s referendum appearances. And there was the wordsmith, André Burelle, the person who put down on paper the words and ideas that Trudeau put into his head. Later, it was generally acknowledged that Burelle was the most important member of the group, although he missed Trudeau’s two key speeches in Montreal. “It was a bit,” he said, “like raising a baby and not being there to present him to the world.” For those to whom Trudeau had seemed out of touch with audiences in English Canada, even out of touch with himself, those referendum speeches would have been a revelation. There were no insults, no rude gestures, and not a single gaffe. As a senior staffer once observed: “He can be brilliant for thirty minutes and screw everything up in thirty seconds.” In the referendum period, though he was working largely from material committed to memory, there were no slipups. He was sure of himself, sure of his material, sure of how he wanted to deliver it. Each of his four speeches struck a higher note than the last one. He had also taken the full measure of his adversaries. In a hushed House of Commons on April 15, with members on both sides sensing it was a little bit of history, Trudeau summarized his ideas of the country and Quebec’s place in it. “After all,” he said, “what is the feeling of belonging to a country, which we call citizenship? And what is the feeling of loving a country, which we call patriotism? Part of the answer lies in our debates, in the policies, laws and the constitution of this country. Part of the answer can be found in the geogra-

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phy and the history of this country, which in a sense are collective notions, history being the recital of things that we have done together in the past.” After a bit more of this high-road stuff, Trudeau zeroed in on the pq. “I had hoped the Parti Québécois would show more sincerity and conviction in this historical moment,” he said. “As far back as January, 1977, I expressed the hope that the referendum question would be clear, that it would come soon, and that it would be definitive, so that we could leave the issue aside for a generation at least ... It is not definitive, since it is obvious in the very wording of the question that there will be a second referendum; and it certainly is not clear, since it is based on a deliberate ambiguity on the part of the Parti Québécois. And then Trudeau gave the answer to a hypothetical question that only the prime minister could give, as to what he would do in the event of a Yes vote on Lévesque’s mandate question for sovereignty-association. “Mr. Lévesque,” said Trudeau, “will have to begin by recognizing that his mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association is a very ambiguous one. He must first recognize that, to associate, one must associate with someone.” And since the prime minister and all the premiers had rejected association, they would have nothing to discuss. “Perhaps Mr. Lévesque will then say: ‘Well, since we cannot discuss association, let us talk purely and simply about sovereignty.’ Obviously the reply will be: ‘Mr. Lévesque, you ... have no mandate to discuss sovereignty. As Canadian prime minister, I do not myself have a mandate to discuss this with you, since your concept of sovereignty is in fact defined in your question as the exclusive power to make your own laws, to collect your own taxes, and to establish your own external relations. Not even two months ago, the people in Quebec, together with the rest of the country, unequivocally elected a government to sit in Ottawa precisely to make laws for the entire country, to collect taxes and redistribute them throughout the entire country and to look after external relations. We have therefore just received from the people in Quebec a mandate to exercise sovereignty for the entire country.’” Clearly, Trudeau’s answer was a No to a Yes. The next question for Trudeau to ask would be whether Lévesque might answer Yes to a No. “What will he do if the No vote wins?” Trudeau asked as he neared the end of his speech to the Chambre de Commerce on May 2. “Do you know? Does Mr. Lévesque know? And if he does, will he tell us? “I wish,” Trudeau concluded, “that every one of us would ask the leader of the government of Quebec, Mr. Lévesque, this question: What will you do if Quebec votes No? We are entitled to know, we want to know, and if you do not dare reply we shall then know that your referendum is a trap ...”

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As a member of the Trudeau referendum circle noted later, Trudeau had left Lévesque with only two options: “One, he could avoid the question, in which case we were on our issue. Or answer the question, as he did, in which case we could come back on him.” Trudeau had thrown out the line like an expert fly fisherman in the swollen streams of Labrador. And Lévesque, like a big fat trout, had taken it. Scarcely two hours after the Trudeau speech, Lévesque called a press conference to give the prime minister his answer. “We’ll continue to go around in circles,” Lévesque said. But he allowed as to how governments would do their duty, one to another. They would talk. So he answered the question, and at the same time he could not answer it, for it presumed the defeat of his option, “a hypothesis in which I refuse to believe.” What was occurring in the campaign was something that could be called the Trudeau effect. It was obvious that the prime minister was distracting the premier, whose serenity of the earlier days of the campaign was being sorely tested as new and less favorable polling results became available to him. Then there were the statements Trudeau was making, about the impossibility of negotiating in the event of a Yes, and the questions he was asking about what Lévesque would do in the event of a No. Canvassers for the No forces picked these up and took them back to the doorsteps of undecided voters. Most of all there was the pride in Trudeau’s presence, a factor that was most tangible in his later appearances at mass meetings in Quebec and Montreal. In the minds of most Quebecers, whatever their political affiliations, there was a certain pride in Trudeau for the place he occupied on the international stage. Like other Canadians, they might not think much about foreign policy, or Canada’s place in the world, but they could relate to Trudeau addressing the United States Congress, or standing on the White House lawn with Jimmy Carter, or attending a Big Seven economic summit or Commonwealth Conference. In a poll conducted for the Montreal weekly Dimanche-Matin at the time of his retirement in 1979, his approval rating shot up to an incredible 84 percent in Quebec. So in Quebec City on May 7, he would play the role of chef d’état and favorite son. He flew into Quebec from Vancouver, where he had been meeting the Japanese prime minister Masayoshi Ohira, and he was skipping Marshall Tito’s funeral in Yugoslavia. As he flew east in the government JetStar, Trudeau suggested to Burelle that maybe they could work that in somehow. On the ground in the Quebec convention center that night, Trudeau said he told Ohira that he wouldn’t be going to Yugoslavia, that he would be going home instead

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to Quebec, “not because I felt you needed a hand, but because I myself need to be among family.” By this time, Trudeau was occupying considerable space in the campaign, bolstering one side and bothering the other. Lévesque then made two serious mistakes. The first was to invite Trudeau to a televised debate, a sure sign the Yes camp was in hot water. Trudeau went to the extraordinary trouble of personally preparing a press release refusing the invitation, reminding Lévesque that according to his own referendum law, he should be dealing with the head of the No committee, Claude Ryan. “Contrary to the spirit and letter of his own referendum law,” Trudeau said in his May 13 communiqué, “he is asking me to short-circuit the No committee and its leader Claude Ryan by debating the referendum question with him. My answer to him is an unequivocal Non, merci!” It was an elegant little thrust that nicked Lévesque on the arm. But Lévesque’s second error would lead to Trudeau flaying him the next evening at a climactic meeting in Montreal. Over the weekend following Trudeau’s Quebec speech, Lévesque explained that Trudeau was also named Elliott, an English name, that he wasn’t a full-fledged Quebecer. Lévesque’s remarks went virtually unreported, except for a small article under a single paragraph heading in The Globe and Mail. It did not, however, escape the attention of Claude Morin of Trudeau’s core group. When they met on Monday, May 12, it was among the clippings put in front of the prime minister. “Some of the people didn’t think it was too important,” Morin said later. “But it was clear he wanted to discuss it.” Speechwriter Burelle, who described Lévesque’s denigrating reference to Elliott as an “extraordinary gift,” set to work on looking “for Péquistes with English names.” As he prepared for the Wednesday night appearance in Montreal, there was also a fair amount of pressure growing on Trudeau to make some firm commitment that a No vote would not simply be taken as a vote for the constitutional status quo. Chrétien went to see him for lunch at 24 Sussex on the day of the speech. “I told him it was an historic occasion,” Chrétien said, “and that the speech would have to be meaningful.” Chrétien said he urged Trudeau to go for broke on a promise of constitutional reform. Chrétien also said he raised the Elliott business with Trudeau, and had the impression the prime minister was hearing about it for the first time. What Trudeau really wanted to know was what Chrétien thought. “Give it to them, Pierre,” he said. And so Trudeau rode to Montreal that afternoon to make the speech of his career, the one that would later be referred to by both sides. The

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scene in the Paul Sauvé arena that evening resembled a rock concert more than a political meeting. There was a sweating, surging crowd, in full-throated cry of Trudeau’s name. They claimed him for their own, and a few minutes into the speech he made the fateful promise of constitutional reform, of the Quebec mps putting their seats on the line for it, and promising not to stop until the work was done. But the heart and soul of the speech was the two minutes of Elliott. “Of course my name is Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” he cried, “Elliott was my mother’s name. It was the name borne by the Elliotts who came to Canada more than 200 years ago. It is the name of the Elliotts who, more than 100 years ago, settled in Saint-Gabriel-de-Brandon, where you can still see their names in the cemetery. That is what the Elliotts are. “Mon nom est Québécois, but my name is a Canadian name also, and that’s the story of my name. “Since Mr. Lévesque has chosen to analyze my name, let me show you how ridiculous it is to use that kind of contemptuous argument. Mr. Pierre Marc Johnson is a minister. Now I ask you, is Johnson an English name or a French name? And Louis O’Neill, a former minister of Mr. Lévesque, and Robert Burns and Daniel Johnson, I ask you, are they Quebecers yes or no? “And if we are looking at names, I saw in yesterday’s newspaper that the leader of Quebec’s Inuit, the Eskimos, they are going to vote No. Do you know what that leader’s name is? His name is Charlie Watt. Is Charlie Watt not a Quebecer? These people have lived in Quebec since the stone age; they have been here since time immemorial. And Mr. Watt is not a Quebecer?” It was the emotional and intellectual coup de grâce of the referendum campaign. For here Trudeau spoke to the history and experience of his people as a family unit, in which most everyone claimed a drop of assimilated English or Irish blood somewhere on the family tree. There were O’Connells and O’Keefes and O’Neills in Quebec who didn’t speak a word of English. For that matter, René Lévesque’s own senior press aides were called Gratia O’Leary and Robert Mackay. The crowd sensed it, too; by this time their chants of “Trudeau, Trudeau”, had changed to “Elliott, Elliott.” Afterward, Commons Speaker Jeanne Sauvé told him she had been on the verge of tears, and Trudeau admitted that he was a bit choked up himself. But he did not linger long to receive congratulations. At the back door, a sedan was waiting to take him to a drop point under Montreal’s elevated Metropolitan Boulevard, where his limousine was waiting to take him the rest of the way home to Ottawa. “Is anybody coming with me?” Trudeau asked no one in particular

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as he left the arena. Nobody was. His staff was remaining behind in Montreal to celebrate his triumph. Long afterward, they wondered what kind of man could make a speech like that and then ride home alone, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

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16 The Big Village: May 20, 1980

Claude Ryan's duplex on St. Joseph Boulevard, off the hill in Outremont, says something about what a small place Quebec is, really nothing more than a big village. Before Ryan bought it in the mid-1960s, the downstairs had been the headquarters of the Social Research Group, where pollster Maurice Pinard and the others had met to put sociological studies of Quebec on a sounder methodological footing. When Ryan moved in, the upstairs tenant was none other than Marc Lalonde, like Pinard a member of the Group of Seven that included Pierre Trudeau in the drafting of the “Canadian Manifesto” of 1964. For years afterwards, Ryan liked to refer to Lalonde as “my former tenant.” It was to this modest brick house that Trudeau came on the bright Tuesday morning of May 20, 1980, Referendum Day, a day in which a generation of Quebecers would have an answer. Ryan had just returned from voting in the basement of St. Viateur church, around the corner on Laurier Avenue, a place where for years of Sundays, he had encountered the likes of Camille Laurin and Jacques-Yvan Morin, apostles of independence, and exchanged pleasantries on the way out of church. Trudeau knew this house, as he had known Ryan for more than thirty years. What Trudeau may not have known was that it was around the corner and up the street a few yards from the Nelson Avenue home of Guy Beaugrand-Champagne, the man who had introduced them all those years ago. While Trudeau went in for a long cup of coffee, the man who would

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accompany him to the polls waited outside on the front lawn. As Trudeau's lawyer, it would be Michel Robert’s task that morning to answer any challenge to the prime minister’s claim of being domiciled at his federal riding office in Mount Royal. A few months later, Robert would again have the prime minister as a client at the September Summit of first ministers on the constitution. Later still, he would argue the federal government’s case on patriation of the constitution before the Supreme Court. Had Robert arrived with Trudeau that morning, it would have presented an awkward moment at Ryan’s front door. For a permanent rift had developed between Ryan and Robert, the man who had invited the publisher of Le Devoir to give the keynote at the Quebec Liberal policy convention of 1977. Robert had been a charter member of the Draft Ryan movement. It was at Ryan’s insistence that he agreed to serve as chairman of the Pro-Canada Committee, the umbrella group of federalist forces which Ryan then forced him to fold by virtue of his effective veto of the committee’s organization plan for the referendum. So like any other lawyer in a village, Robert went out and got himself another client. Trudeau and Ryan may not have recalled why Beaugrand-Champagne, the man around the corner, had brought them together in the first place, thinking that they would be among the leaders of their generation. This prediction had been borne out by events, though the years had taken them on divergent paths. It was another man of their generation, René Lévesque, who had brought them to this day. It was Lévesque, finally, who brought the remedy of the ballot box to bear on the matter that consumed the best energies of their generation, and divided their loyalties as well as their friendships. From the federalist perspective, it was known as the constitutional question. From the vantage point of the indépendantiste camp, it was called the national question. Trudeau, Ryan and Lévesque spoke to the question as the leaders of their generation. And whatever one thought of their ideas, one had to admire their purpose. Each had gone into political life at a mature age, with a comprehensive political agenda, not to be someone but to do something. Trudeau was 46 when he went to Ottawa with Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand to assert their claims on the federal system. Lévesque was 37 when he abandoned his career as French Canada’s leading broadcast journalist to become a Liberal candidate and minister in Jean Lesage’s government in 1960, the administration that opened the doors to the Quiet Revolution. And Ryan, youngest of the three despite appearances, was 53 when he became leader of the Quebec Liberals in 1978, with the goal of finding a middle way between Trudeau and Lévesque. Each had gathered to himself a group

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of adherents who were remarkable for their ideas as well as their numbers. The Quebec of their generation, and the one that followed, had produced a quality of leadership out of all proportion to the importance of a little society of six million people. “Quebec is Indiana,” as Michel Robert observed, “with the same population and the same industrial base.” Yet Quebec, in the pioneer activism of Trudeau’s generation, and the political ferment of Robert’s, had produced the dominant political personalities, engaged in the most interesting clash of ideas, on the Canadian scene. Perhaps this could be attributed precisely to the fact that Quebec was just a village, where everyone knew everyone. “You would expect people to know people better in a small nation more than in a large one,” said Claude Forget, the former social affairs minister in the second government of Robert Bourassa, who had been a year ahead of him at the University of Montreal law faculty in the mid-1950s. Gérard Pelletier had once had this discussion with John Turner, about how Quebec had thrown up so many leaders, when Englishspeaking Canada was so bereft of them. As Pelletier recalled it years later, Turner thought it was because the best people in English Canada gravitated to the private sector, the reverse of the trend in Quebec. Michel Robert, standing out on the front lawn, belonged to the next generation, the generation that had split apart in college and university over the national question. They came out of the classical colleges, Brébeuf and Ste. Marie, and they went on to the law faculties of Montreal and Laval. Twenty years later, they emerged as the leaders of their generation. From Robert’s time at the Université de Montréal, there were the likes of Robert Burns, the brilliant parliamentarian and first house Leader of the Lévesque government; Pierre Marois and Bernard Landry, both future members of the Lévesque cabinet, and Francis Fox, who would become a Trudeau aide and later a cabinet minister in Ottawa. At the same time, an even larger group of future public figures was flowering at Laval’s law and social science faculties. In a mock parliament, the first leader of an independent Quebec was Jean Garon, later the jovial-looking agriculture minister in the Lévesque cabinet. The leader of the opposition was Brian Mulroney, head of a rather unusual rump of future Conservatives that included Michael Meighen, later national president of the Conservative party, and Mulroney confidants Jean Bazin and Michel Cogger as well as Lucien Bouchard. There were future Lévesque cabinet members such as Clément Richard and Denis de Belleval, as well as André Ouellet. And those were just the public figures. Behind them stood a host of comers who would take over the Quebec public service, as well as

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making a name for French Canadians at the top of the federal civil service, as well as the judiciary. Between them at Montreal and Laval, they formed as tight a network as anything seen among the old school ties of English-speaking Canada. “It wasn’t complicated,” Mulroney said twenty years later. “Everybody knew everybody. There were only two law schools, Montreal and Laval. The McGill guys weren’t on our route.” Down the road, though they would become mortal political foes over the national question, the men and women of this generation remained personal friends. They were almost the last of that old school of Quebec’s closely linked political elites. By the end of the 1960s, the classical colleges were supplanted by junior colleges known as cegeps, and by the 1980s there were more than forty of them around the province. Where Laval and Montreal had been the two universities of consequence, the Université de Sherbrooke and the Université du Québec, with several campuses, grew by leaps and bounds in the 1970s and into the ‘80s. There would be no more generations quite like the one represented by the man who stood on Claude Ryan’s front lawn on the morning of the referendum. Not only had students been dispersed throughout the education system, but by the end of the 1970s, they were going in for different things, crowding into the business faculties. It was no longer the Quebec of their fathers, for their fathers had changed it. Whatever the evening would hold for them on May 20, the men and women of Trudeau’s and Ryan’s and Lévesque’s generation had brought the national question to a formulation, if not a resolution. Trudeau had some thoughts on that, although he did not fully share them with Ryan. He said he wanted to move quickly on the constitution after the referendum. What he did not say, what no one could have imagined, what Ryan would have protested in the strongest terms, was how quickly. As Trudeau left Ryan that morning, it was really the end of the uneasy alliance. In the car on the way over to vote in Mount Royal, Robert asked him the question on everyone’s mind that day: how would the vote come out? Trudeau was less optimistic for the prospects of a big No sweep than might have been imagined. His guess was that it would come in somewhere between 55 and 57 percent. Perhaps he was merely fearing the worst, since a 55 percent score for the No would have given the Yes a moral victory, a majority of the Frenchspeaking voters. More likely, he was simply repeating Chrétien’s prediction, based on federal polling data, of a 10 to 12 point margin of victory. The man who had waved goodbye to Trudeau on the sidewalk in front of his house had experienced his own moments of uncertainty

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over the holiday weekend, la fête de la reine. In Quebec on Saturday morning, Ryan was visiting the No committee room in suburban Ste. Foy when he was called to take a phone call from his chief organizer, Pierre Bibeau, in Montreal. Bibeau had just receieved the leaked results of the final iqop poll that would be published in the following day’s edition of Dimanche-Matin. It was not good news. The iqop survey, conducted at mid-week, projected a 52 to 48 win for the Yes, reversing a 52 to 48 lead for the No only the previous week. It hardly seemed possible that a four-point swing could have occurred in the space of a few days. And of course, it wasn’t. But it gave Ryan a bit of a jolt. “He came back from the telephone,” said Bernard Langevin, who was travelling with him, “white as a ghost.” Ryan was very worried, as Liberal mna Jean-Claude Rivest noted, “not about the poll so much as its impact.” By the next morning, when the No organizers had a chance to examine the iqop numbers and methodology, they were satisfied that it was wrong. But if anything, it seemed to have the salutary effect of a cold shower upon the No forces, who had been lulled by their optimistic canvassing, or pointage, which indicated a big federalist win in a range of 60 to 63 per cent. “You don’t know how it woke people up,” said Léonce Mercier, the one-time chairman of Raymond Garneau’s leadership campaign who was on loan to the No committee from the Quebec wing of the federal Liberals, where he had become director general. The other side had also received an advance copy of the iqop poll from the company’s president, Jean-Pierre Nadeau, the previous afternoon. But the generally demoralized Lévesque forces, who could have used a bit of a boost that weekend, didn’t believe it either. The very best construction they could put on their own polling figures was a 52 to 48 loss for the Yes, and their more probable scenario called for a 58 to 42 win for the federalist forces. René Lévesque, in a Sunday afternoon news conference, was curiously subdued, even morbid, when he ought to have been jubilant at the latest poll results. Quite clearly, he did not believe it. Some people in the Yes camp may well have suspected that the polling numbers were cooked by the other side to scare a few swing voters back onside with the No. For its part, the Ryan entourage suspected that the numbers had been manipulated to present the most favorable hypothesis for the Yes. Certainly Ryan would not have given himself all that trouble on the last full day of the campaign. Since April 13, he had not permitted himself a single day off. Now he was coming down with such a bad cold that he was scarcely able to talk. That afternoon, at his wife’s adamant insistence, he would cancel his first event of the campaign, a meeting in the North Shore community of Louiseville some fifty miles east of

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Montreal that Robert Bourassa would attend in his place. Ryan would not even have got out of bed that morning to attend a church breakfast in suburban Laval, had he not been determined to show the colors and refute the conclusions of the iqop poll. Very few, if any, reporters believed it. Their attitude was summarized by the cbc’s Don Macpherson who asked one colleague: “How would you like to have shares in iqop this morning?” More seriously, reporters asked themselves if they’d seen anything in the final week of the campaign to account for a four-point swing, other than the controvery over the federal government’s advertising binge, which may have produced a small backlash, but nothing as significant as a four-point turnaround on a question of country. Still, they had their jobs to do, and that morning’s assignment was to get Ryan’s explanation. Marc Lalonde stood off to one side and said he didn’t believe it, either. “It can’t be,” Lalonde said, referring to private federal polls that indicated a No win on the order of 57 percent. Lalonde was on his way to Paris for a meeting of energy ministers, and he would spend referendum night in the company of Gérard Pelletier, listening to the returns on a hookup with Radio-Canada. At one point in the evening, Lalonde suggested they go over to the Maison du Québec, and have a glass of champagne that was being offered by delegate general Yves Michaud as his guests watched a color television feed from Radio-Quebec. “I have as much right there as anyone,” Lalonde said. Pelletier had the impression that he was just kidding. In any event, they stayed put, and a possible diplomatic contretemps was averted. It was past midnight in Paris when the voting concluded in Montreal and around the province. All day, the people of Quebec had streamed to the polls in record numbers. Of the 4,367,134 names on the electoral list, 3,673,842 would answer the referendum question. It was an astonishing turnout of 85.61 percent. In the first hour and the last, the heaviest voting periods, long lineups stretched outside polling stations in church basements and school gymnasia. In some polls, particularly in the predominantly English-speaking West Island, where some voters claimed they were needlessly held up by Yes scrutineers, the final votes were not cast until long after the polls were officially closed. Then the province, and the country, settled back to await the results. At 425 St. Joseph Boulevard, Ryan’s house was full of his kids and their friends. By now, Ryan was beginning to shake off the effects of his cold, and he had recoverd his confidence sufficiently to predict that the No side would triumph with a 62 percent score, the same guess he had made five weeks previously at a Garrison Club luncheon in Quebec with Bourassa and Jean Lesage. On that evening of evenings, he was surrounded by few friends and advisers. Bernard Langevin, secre-

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tary of the Ryan road show, was about the only outsider from the political entourage present in the Ryan home. The others waited for him at the No referendum-night headquarters in the old Verdun Auditorium, from Bibeau on down to Herb Laviollette, the Air Canada pilot who had been the captain of Ryan’s charter DC-9, dubbed the “DC-Non.” At 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa, Pierre Trudeau gathered half a dozen staff members and colleagues. Commons Speaker Jeanne Sauvé was there, along with Trudeau’s principal secretary, Jim Coutts; cabinet secretary Michael Pitfield; de Montigny Marchand from the referendum core group in the prime minister’s office; press secretary Patrick Gossage, and speechwriter André Burelle. There were two television sets going in the Trudeau living room, one tuned to Radio-Canada and the other to the cbc, and a lively argument ensued among the guests whether they should turn up the volume in English or in French. Trudeau ignored the chatter around him, he was riveted on the results. They weren’t long in coming. From the earliest returns rolling in from the easternmost corner of the province, it was clear the No forces were building to a significant victory. Half an hour after the polls closed, the game was clearly up for Lévesque. Within another ten minutes, the cbc called Ryan and the No side as the winners. At Montreal’s Paul Sauvé arena, traditional election-night gathering place of the Parti Québécois, René Lévesque was curiously alone on the night of his defeat. Where he had been mobbed by tearful supporters on the night of the pq election victory in 1976, he was now a solitary figure on stage except for his wife, Corinne, who clutched a single long-stemmed rose. Further upstage stood Lise Payette, the only member of Lévesque’s cabinet who was there to face the music. She had committed the biggest blunder of the Yes campaign in March with a remark that sparked the Yvette movement, the most spontaneous occurrence of the entire campaign. Lévesque had always been good in defeat. On another spring evening, a decade earlier, he had stood in the same place and tried to put the best face on his party’s having only seven seats to show for its 23 percent of the vote in the 1970 election. That night, he asked if his people didn’t see the moral victory of a new party winning even half a dozen seats. It was Lévesque at his best, defusing what might have been an explosive situation. Similarly on referendum night in 1980, he could take heart from the fact that 40.5 percent of the electorate had endorsed his mandate question for sovereignty-association. “We have to swallow it this time,” Lévesque began, conceding that “this hurts more than any election defeat.” He acknowledged that clearly

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Quebecers wanted to give federalism another chance, asserting that the “ball is in the federal camp.” On the whole, it was a moving and graceful concession speech, apart from his predictable attack on the “scandalous” entry of Trudeau and the feds into the campaign. Watching this in Ryan’s dressing room at the Verdun Auditorium, Jean Chrétien muttered that Lévesque was “a goddamn hypocrite.” There was quite a different reaction to Lévesque’s concession in the living room of 24 Sussex. Everyone in the room later said that Trudeau genuinely felt for Lévesque that night. When someone mentioned to the prime minister that he seemed touched by Lévesque’s concession, Trudeau defended himself against his own feelings. “I would have felt a lot sorrier for him,” Trudeau said, “If he had been defeated on an honest question.” As always, Trudeau had a way of concealing his thoughts and camouflaging his emotions. As the result became clear that evening, he turned to speechwriter Burelle and said: “If I understand it correctly, I don’t need the text for the Yes.” There was such a text, and there still is, locked away in Burelle’s files in Ottawa. Presumably it will be released some day, after the thirtyyear embargo on state papers expires, after most of the principals of this generation are dead and buried. Only then will Quebecers and Canadians know what Trudeau would have said in the event of a Yes. Burelle would give only one hint. “It would have been consistent,” said the former philosophy professor, “with the logic of the previous speeches.” As it was, Trudeau was not in the position of having to answer that question, though he was undoubtedly concerned to assist in the process of binding up the wounds. There was only one text for a No result, not one for 51 percent and another for 59.5 percent. In preparing it, Burelle said later, “we were only hoping that Lévesque could not use the argument that it was because of the English.” Reviewing the text, Trudeau decided to make no changes and only one addition. He got out a pen and in his broad hand wrote a single sentence across the top of the first page of the French text. “Never,” he wrote, “have I felt so proud to be a Quebecer and a Canadian.” It was his answer to Lévesque’s opening remarks on the night of his victory in 1976, that he had never felt so proud to be a Quebecer. Trudeau was able to add, “and a Canadian.” With that, he got ready to go downtown and speak to the country from the National Press Theatre on Wellington Street, five minutes drive from 24 Sussex. But like the rest of Quebec and Canada he had to wait for Claude Ryan to finish talking. And wait and wait and wait. On the two television sets in Trudeau’s living room, Ryan was

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giving every appearance of being a sore winner. It wasn’t his words so much as the way he delivered his victory speech. He appeared to have seriously misjudged the occasion, to be giving a raw and partisan stump speech, a harangue, rather than calling for a healing and reconciliation of Quebecers, as indeed he had planned to do. But between the time he left home, and the moment he climbed onto the stage in Verdun, something had happened to Ryan that threw him badly off balance. The organizers of the evening had planned that Chrétien would introduce Ryan, and had invited the justice minister there for that purpose. That was their first mistake, since it was an occasion on which only the heads of the three clans were expected to speak. Ryan had himself agreed to this on the telephone with Trudeau, earlier in the evening. Trudeau had said that Ryan should speak first for the federalist forces, since it had been his campaign, and Ryan agreed that Trudeau should have the last word, since he was prime minister of Canada. Ryan was also sensitive to the perception that the feds should be seen as having won the day. He had already been annoyed earlier in the evening when he looked in on the television coverage by RadioCanada and saw none other than Jean Chrétien sitting in as one of the network’s panelists. For Chrétien, who had come down to Montreal after voting in his home riding of Shawinigan, it was an evening for a bit of vindication. “Ah, it’s a beautiful studio,” he had said on the way in, “in a beautiful building, built by the federal government.” Ryan was not amused to see Chrétien on television. “I felt that since we had worked as a team,” he said later, “it was not at all appropriate that one member of the team should go and issue comments before the leader of the team had spoken. And I thought he should have cleared that with me before he did it, you know. And that was the beginning.” What happened next, below the stands of the old Verdun auditorium, was a scene that no one there soon forgot. Ryan arrived and began his customary round of handshakes and kissing the ladies, Solange Chaput-Rolland and Aline Chrétien among others, on both cheeks. A few minutes after Lévesque’s concession, Ryan was told by one of the organizers of the evening, an advance man named Pierre Brodeur, that it was time to go on. Chrétien would be up first, would say a few words, and introduce him. Ryan, still fighting off his flu, bone-weary from his non-stop campaign, did what any exasperated person would do in his place. He blew up. He was terribly sensitive to the perception that the feds had saved his campaign. Moreover his travelling secretary Bernard Langevin thought he detected a pang or two of jealousy on Ryan’s part that Trudeau and Chrétien should be receiving so much credit in the closing days of the campaign. “I

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remember,” Ryan said later, “I may have had a couple of harsh words for Chrétien.” He had more than a few harsh words. “No, no, no,” Ryan told Brodeur. “Nobody but me will speak. I’m the head of the No forces. I will speak.” Chrétien, standing a few feet away, appeared crestfallen, and was told by his wife that, there, there, it was nothing. Ryan turned to him and told him he was the boss. “That’s okay,” Chrétien said, “it wasn’t me who asked to come here.” Much later, he minimized the importance of the incidence saying that Ryan “was nervous that night.” But the incident did reopen a sore between them, and in a larger sense between the two federalist camps. It also threw Ryan completely off stride. Instead of going out and saying that it was a time for healing, as he had planned to do, he charged into the arena like an angry bull with his nostrils flaring. In the hall, he delivered what appeared to be a strong partisan speech. On television, it was horrifyingly bad, and would haunt Ryan afterwards. He sternly called upon the government to observe “the lesson which the referendum imposes, a useful lesson, it seems to me, to be faithful to the popular will as it’s just been expressed in the referendum.” Ryan was calling on the government to resign and face the people in new elections to clarify the personality of Quebec’s bargaining agent in the inevitable negotiations towards renewed federalism. Had he been at Le Devoir, this would have been a perfectly logical conclusion for the next morning’s editorial. For a politician, it was a terrible mistake. First, he was making news on a day when there had already been quite enough news. Nothing more was expected of him than to be a generous winner. He had every intention of being one, but he left that speech in the dressing room. It was the speech he had made at a dress rehearsal the previous evening in Lachute, a strongly bilingual town in his riding of Argentueil, northwest of Montreal. There, on the eve of the vote, he had been able to look beyond the tensions and turmoil of the long campaign. He had looked within himself for the best in himself. “One thing I learned at my mother’s knee,” he had said the previous evening of the French and the English of Quebec and Canada, “is that we are different, but that we must love each other.” And if you looked beyond the austere image, there was an element of that message of fraternity in his victory statement that was generally overlooked. “This evening in leaving my home to come here,” he said at Verdun, “a young man of around eighteen years came up to me. He said to me, ‘Mr. Ryan, I voted Yes today, but I want to congratulate you on the fine campaign you’ve waged.’ I thanked this young man, and I said to him that his behavior was an example for all of us.”

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He even tried to thank the women who had worked in the campaign, the Yvettes “from Gaspé, from Rimouski, from Sept-Iles, from Quebec, from Chicoutimi, from Valleyfield, from Joliette, from Trois-Rivières, from Shawinigan, from Sherbrooke, from St. Jean, from Ste. Hyacinthe and everywhere across Quebec.” There was the cadence of a campaign speech, but the occasion was all wrong. Looking at Ryan’s rostrumthumping speech, many Quebecers formed an opinion of him, or confirmed their worst opinion of him. For the battle for the hearts and minds of Quebecers, to use the operative cliché, was far from concluded. In a sense, even as he lost their minds, Lévesque won their hearts as he led a chorus of “Gens du pays,” the Gilles Vigneault song he had called “our national anthem by anticipation.” He then coined a new pq slogan in his parting words, “à la prochaine.” Till the next time, he said, raising his arms in a boxer’s salute. No wonder Trudeau, as his press secretary Patrick Gossage noted, “felt a certain empathy for him.” And since Ryan was losing their hearts even as he had won their minds, it was left to Trudeau to summarize the occasion, as Ryan himself acknowledged, “gracefully and beautifully.” “We are experiencing tonight,” Trudeau said, “the fullness of democracy, with all its joys and sorrows.” It was the healing gesture Quebecers on both sides had waited for. And finally, Trudeau was something Ryan was not, a political actor. As much as he had reproached the pq for lacking the courage of their convictions, he now said he could not forget “all those Yes supporters who fought with such strong convictions. ... Their disappointment prevents me from entering unreservedly into the spirit of celebration.” And he continued: “To my fellow Quebecers who have been wounded by defeat, I wish to say simply that we have all lost a little in this referendum. If you take account of the broken friendships, the strained family relationships, the hurt pride, there is no one among us who has not suffered some wound which we must try to heal in the days and weeks to come.” And so the day, and the referendum era, passed into history. And the healing would begin soon enough. It had been the most remarkable time to be living in Quebec, between November of 1976 and May of 1980. For three and a half years, there had been an intense debate over a question of country. And through it all, most remarkably, not a single shot was fired in anger. As Ryan himself said many times, in many contexts: Formidable, formidable.

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17 The Silent Spring

Later on, the pollsters and pundits would refer to the phenomenon as the depolarization of Quebec. This was a fancy way of saying that, in the voters’ minds, the referendum was over, and with it the alignment of public opinion that crushed the pq’s option in 1980. Nobody could be quite sure just when or how this happened, least of all Claude Ryan, because he refused to authorize the necessary funds for polling in the fall of 1980 and the winter of 1981. In a nonscientific but very much in an observable sense, the depolarization set in around the table of the Quebec family at Christmas of 1980. For the previous four holiday seasons, these reunions had been marked by the family divisions that plagued Quebec society as a whole during the referendum era. Now that it was over, the voters were clearly relieved that they could get on with the ordinary business of living. Something very noticeable happened early in the New Year. While people were fixing up their licence plates, they decided to take the Quebec, QuebecCanada or Canada plate off the front of the car. More than a thousand polls, this should have signaled the end of the referendum period. But nearly everyone missed it. Everyone, that is, except René Lévesque. By February of 1981 Lévesque was talking about winning 72 ridings in the new 122-seat National Assembly. To most observers, it appeared the premier was either smoking funny cigarettes, or simply whistling past the graveyard. In fact, he had it from his pollster, Michel Lepage, that the pq had successfully waited out the depolarization of the voters. As long as independence was not the issue in an election, and

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Lévesque had already seen to it within his own party that it would not be, then he had a good chance of winning. With the referendum issue settled, the electorate would be more likely to vote its satisfaction with the government, and its satisfaction with the Lévesque government was very high indeed. As for a beauty contest between Lévesque and Ryan, it was no contest. Lévesque enjoyed something Ryan did not. If the premier did not always live in a state of political grace, he had the capacity to obtain forgiveness. Ryan was increasingly perceived as a meanspirited reminder of Quebec’s priest-ridden past. A lot of voters were still bothered by his aggressive victory speech on referendum night. In late 1980 and early 1981, the ground slipped from beneath his feet. And he didn’t even know it. For Ryan had developed an aversion to polls, or at least to spending the Liberal party’s money on them. “It’s not wise, it’s not smart,” said Yvan Corbeil, president of the crop polling house in a prescient remark in late October of 1980. “I think Ryan is doing himself a disservice.” Normally, as Corbeil remarked, Ryan could expect a winkle from other polls, crop polls for the federal government, or Sorecom surveys for the Montreal and Quebec newspapers. In the referendum period, Corbeil pointed out, “Ryan’s entourage knew even if he didn’t.” It was about this time that Ryan had a long argument in a parking lot outside a television station with Maurice Pinard, the George Gallup of Quebec pollsters. Pinard had not only called the pq victory in 1976, at a time when the publisher of Le Devoir, Claude Ryan, made a point about keeping his faith in polls. Pinard had also called the referendum to within half a point of the outcome. As it would develop, he would also call the 1981 election in a range of 76 to 84 seats for the pq, and the result would fall smack in the middle of that range. Pinard’s 1981 projection was based on field work compiled by the Sorecom firm of Soucy Gagné, his old associate from the pioneering Social Research Group. In one of those coincidences that occurs only in Quebec, the Social Research Group had its offices at 425 St. Joseph Boulevard, and for a while Gagné lived upstairs. Later, Claude Ryan bought the house. So Pinard and Ryan went back a long way in professional and personal terms. And here they were having this bitter argument about the necessity and usefulness of polls. The last information Ryan had to go on was the result of four byelections on November 17, one in the Liberal fortress of Outremont, and three ridings in the Eastern Townships that had been held by the Union Nationale. The Liberals won easily, as you would expect, in Outremont, where the candidate, Pierre Fortier, looked like a reasonable facsimile of the Man from Glad. But though the Liberals gained

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the three Township seats, the pq finished a very interesting second in two of them, Megantic-Compton and Johnson, losing Johnson by only a few hundred votes. When you looked at the results, as Lévesque and his braintrust did, the old bleu vote was in the process of crossing over to the pq in a context where independence was not an issue. Ryan and his people took no apparent notice of this. They had run their byelection record to 11 to 0, plus the big win in the referendum. Why shouldn’t they be feeling confident about the general election, whenever Lévesque dared to face the voters? It was then, in the period of late 1980 to early 1981, that the political climate changed. And Ryan, too headstrong to hire a political weatherman, was heading into a big storm. In losing the last batch of by-elections, Lévesque only proved that he would have been cleaned in a general election that day, four years plus two days after his accession to power. Normally he would have called an election. It was his inclination that it was the right thing to do. He didn’t like staying on past four years in office, even if he was going to lose. Now he would stay in power over the winter months, always the toughest political season in Quebec. And his prospects for re-election in the spring were decidedly gloomy. Still, Lévesque had two good reasons for hanging on, both of them called Pierre Trudeau. It was Trudeau who had nearly tested the five-year constitutional limit of his July 1974 mandate, holding off the next election until the end of May, 1979. If it was acceptable for Trudeau to cling to office at one level, the federalist side in Quebec was in an awkward position to criticize Lévesque for doing the same thing at another level. And then there was Trudeau’s unilateral push on patriating the constitution with an amending formula and an entrenched charter of rights. Trudeau unveiled the package on the evening of October 3, just two weeks after the failure of the September Summit of first ministers in Ottawa. To say that Claude Ryan was shocked was something of an understatement. As early as May 21, the morrow of the referendum, he had publicly cautioned Trudeau against moving with undue haste, especially before Quebecers had an opportunity to change their bargaining agent in an election. Ryan had some inkling of what the prime minister was up to from their conversation in the Quebec leader’s study on the morning of the referendum vote. “He told me he wanted to move rapidly,” Ryan said later. “He told me he was intent on patriating the document. I insisted there were some considerations that had to be met. We did not go much beyond that. It was a friendly conversation, but I could not have inferred from what he said that he would attempt to do it in the way he did.”

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The day after Trudeau’s October surprise package began much as any other for Ryan. He left home at 9:30, hopped in the front seat of his government-issue Pontiac, and had the driver drop one of his daughters off at school. Under his arm that morning, he carried a briefcase bulging with the usual number of documents. Later in the day, he would have to face the press. He would have to say something on the one issue above all that engaged his mind and stirred the passions of his heart. In the privacy of his Gilford Street office that day, he raged at the timing and thrust of the Trudeau package. In public, he was placed in the awkward position between his nominal ally, Trudeau, and his sworn adversary, Lévesque. “Don’t worry about Claude Ryan,” he told reporters. “I’ve been in a lot of tight corners before.” But he would never emerge from this one. On the one hand, he deplored the unilateral nature of the federal package; on the other, he would have to applaud the Victoria amending formula, which assured Quebec of a regional veto, and the entrenchment of minority language rights in a charter, a cause for which he had been a tireless champion during his years at Le Devoir. And, much as he deplored the unilateral aspect of the Trudeau resolution, much as he was horrified by the political timing of it, there was simply nothing he could do about it, for he was only the leader of the opposition in a provincial legislature. Before he could speak on behalf of Quebec, he would need a mandate, as he would put it, expressing “the sovereign will of the people.” But for the time being, and until further notice, the bargaining agent for Quebec was René Lévesque, and the Trudeau package gave him the pretext he needed to hang on over the winter. By Thanksgiving Weekend, the provincial premiers had met in Toronto and there were already the makings of a common front of six dissenting provinces, with Nova Scotia wavering but likely to move onside. To put that common front together, Lévesque would need time, and he would take it. For the next six months, right up to the election, the alliance of dissenting provinces would consume much of his energies. Of course, it was strictly an alliance of convenience, and would later crumble in the space of a single November night in Ottawa, while René Lévesque slept across the river in Hull. Lévesque himself would have a fair amount to answer for in signing the declaration of the eight dissenting provinces on April 16, 1981, only three days after his electoral triumph. In the April 16 manifesto, for the sake of unanimity, Lévesque abandoned Quebec’s veto claims and went along with the Vancouver formula, which required the consent of any seven provinces adding up to 50 percent of the population. There would be an opting-

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out clause for provinces that didn’t want to go along with changes, with full financial compensation, a key clause that was later dropped over Lévesque’s protests. So you had the irony of Trudeau, the centralizing devil, maintaining Quebec’s veto in the Victoria formula, and the autonomist premier of Quebec giving up those claims in the Vancouver formula. It was not a position that any Quebec Liberal leader had ever advocated or ever could. In any event, all this would occur after an election in which Lévesque neither sought nor received a mandate for constitutional change, just as Trudeau had not requested a similar mandate in the federal election of 1980. All Lévesque said was summarized in his campaign slogan: Faut rester forts. It would be a campaign of brilliantly mounted images of the popular premier surrounded by strong ministers like Jacques Parizeau. When Lévesque finally pulled the plug in the National Assembly on March 12, the Liberals began what they and most observers assumed would be a triumphal return to power. In fact, the election was a tossup at that point. In the view of senior Péquistes like Claude Charron, it could actually be won or lost in the campaign. Depending on the thirdparty splits, the pq could form another government with as little as 44 percent of the popular vote. The Liberals, with their wasted English votes, needed at least 51 to 45 spread over the pq. Even before the campaign senior Liberal organizers like Jim McCann, though unshakeable in their optimism, figured it was a close thing, something like a 52 to 44 proposition. In other words, with a five-point swing in the campaign, the results could favor the pq by a 49 to 47 margin in the popular vote, with a comfortable Péquiste majority in terms of seats. So at the outset of the month-long campaign, the election was in the bag for neither side. Instead, it was in the hat, and the outcome would depend largely on the campaign shakeout. The pq’s principal campaign strategist, Michel Carpentier, had designed a campaign that took account of certain realities. First, while Lévesque was the undisputed star of the team, he was also 58 years old, and should be scheduled accordingly. Second, since the government was more popular than its option or even the party, maximum use should be made of popular ministers like Jacques Parizeau and Pierre Marc Johnson. Where they had been practically invisible during the referendum, members of the Lévesque team suddenly turned up in television spots. Lévesque’s electoral braintrust was also determined to improve the government’s standing among women and rural voters, who had voted in decisive numbers against the government’s mandate question in 1980. For the rural vote, it was enough to send agriculture minister Jean Garon on the road by himself, as Quebec’s answer to

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Ottawa’s Gene Whelan. Though Garon was an economist out of Laval, he projected the image of a country boy taking the city folks to the cleaners. For the women’s vote, the pq bombarded the airwaves in the afternoon with reassuring messages and reminders of all it had done for the status of women. As for the premier, he was fighting his eighth campaign in twenty years, and he had learned how to pace himself. The typical campaign day would begin around 11 a.m. with Lévesque feeding a “Gainesburger” of a campaign promise to the hungry hounds of the press corps. Then, as at Laval on April 2, he would go into a luncheon with a target group – in this case about 800 senior citizens, every last one of them the soul of middle-class respectability. Lévesque would normally take some down time after lunch, with perhaps a photo opportunity in the late afternoon, followed by a big meeting geared to regional press and militants in the evening. In the first two weeks of the campaign, Lévesque used up a whole box of Gainesburgers. The most intriguing of all was his housing platform, in which he promised that a family with a child less than a year old would be eligible for a $10,000 low-interest housing loan, with a portion of the debt to be forgiven with the birth of each subsequent child. One French-language daily gleefully headlined the program as “The Revenge of the Cradle.” Instead of ridiculing Lévesque’s barrage of promises, Ryan gave the appearance of trying to match them. In the second week of the campaign he went ahead with his own pre-planned progression of promises, including a housing plank that pledged $5,000 grants to persons buying homes valued at less than $50,000. He also had something for women, namely making family-allowance payments receivable from the time a woman’s pregnancy was confirmed by her physician. On a doctrinal level, this led to the obvious conclusion that a fetus is a living human being and should be treated as such. On a practical level, it would encourage women to visit their doctors early in pregnancy, and ultimately result in healthier babies. It was a thoughtful and interesting wrinkle, but it was received with derision. By this time, Ryan was perceived as being caught in a game of catch-up with Lévesque. Ryan was also sending out confusing signals, after saying for months that hard times would require hard spending decisions by government. Given the barrage of promises made by both leaders in the first half of the campaign, one columnist was reminded of the axiom of Prince Edward Island elections: if it moves, pension it, if it doesn’t, pave it. Ryan’s promises of Week Two weren’t his first mistakes of the campaign. In the previous week, he had inadvertently played to the allegations of his meanness of spirit. It came in response to Roch LaSalle’s

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taunt that Ryan had endorsed the pq in 1976, and presumably followed his own advice in the polling booth. In fact, the Union Nationale leader was grasping at straws in the wind, since Ryan had followed his own advice in 1976 in one of those ridings, Outremont, where the Liberals offered a “superior candidate,” André Raynauld. Instead of making this point, or simply ignoring LaSalle altogether, Ryan ripped into LaSalle as “lacking the breadth and depth of view which must be expected of a political leader. I think I’m stating the obvious when I say that.” And so he was. It would have been a perfectly normal observation for a newspaper editorialist, but coming from an opponent, and especially one with Ryan’s image problems, it sounded presumptuous and pompous. More to the point, it was politically stupid. The Union Nationale was plainly going nowhere, so nothing was to be gained by attacking its personable leader. The old Union Nationale vote had to go somewhere, and if Ryan belittled the intelligence of the un leader, what was he thinking of its clientele? Ryan spent a few days shaking off this mistake and then blundered into another unforced error on the Thursday of Week Two when he said that the Assembly’s deputy speaker had been ineffective in the chair, but you had to understand these things, “because she’s a woman.” Heaven knows what Ryan meant to say, and Louise Cuerrier certainly was ineffective, but Ryan’s remark cost him a few more days’ momentum. By then, the first polls were out, and he was really in trouble, suddenly trying desperately to catch up. On March 28, the big Montreal Saturday papers hit the streets with the first public opinion polls of the campaign. Both were bad news for Ryan. The crop survey for La Presse gave the pq a surprising ninepoint lead, at 41 to 32. The second survey, in The Gazette and Le Soleil of Quebec City was in a sense even worse. It was a Sorecom, analyzed by Maurice Pinard, and it put the pq ahead 44 to 38, or 50 to 44 when the undecideds were adjusted. It meant that Ryan was not only not holding his own, he was steadily losing ground. The Liberals wasted no time convoking an emergency meeting of the campaign high command that very afternoon on Gilford Street. Ryan’s mood was solicitous. What did he need to do to win? He was told bluntly that Week Two had been a disaster for him. He was advised to try to force the issue of the pq still being a separatist party, and he was urged to emphasize the Liberal team. It was also decided that weekend to put Madeleine Ryan back on the road with him. For the remainder of the campaign, for the first and only time in his five years in politics, he put himself in the hands of the party professionals. He would do whatever they deemed necessary, and whatever he felt comfortable with, to win.

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Two days later, on March 30, Ryan brought out the new line that the separatist menace had not receded with the referendum of the previous May. “A lot of people,” he suggested on a Montreal hot line show, “seem to think that the problem of separatism was settled following the defeat of the Parti Québécois in the referendum. But the only way of saying with a clear, decisive voice, to the rest of Canada that we want to remain in the federal structure is to elect the only party with a clear federalist position.” It was a day for even more global concerns. In the afternoon, Ryan was touring the Valleyfield area of western Quebec when the word came of the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in Washington. For any North American politician, especially one exposed to the dangers of a campaign, it was a sobering moment. In their own small way, both Ryan and Lévesque were aware of it that evening as they campaigned, a few miles apart from each other, on the South Shore of Montreal. Lévesque was surrounded by a beefed up contingent of four nervous bodyguards as he walked into a wild reception from 2,000 pq activists in a Longueuil arena. It was a choreographed evening, with born-again testimony from five area residents as to why they were voting for the government. There was a slide show, followed by the premier’s appearance. It mattered not what he said. The crowd cheered him to the echo. It had to do with the magic. He always had it. He still did. And Claude Ryan never had, never would. That was the difference between them. When all other factors such as independence were effectively neutralized, and all other things being equal, Lévesque would be the winner of a beauty contest with Ryan. Madeleine Ryan, traveling for the first time with her husband on March 31, tried to make light of such a reference in a newspaper column. If this was a beauty contest between the two husbands, she said, then she felt sorry for Mme Lévesque. Madeleine Ryan was talking near the beginning of the longest and, what proved to be, the most fruitless day, of her husband’s campaign. It would take him some 2,200 kilometers by air, in a chartered Convair turboprop from Innotech Aviation in Dorval, on to Sept-Iles, the windswept Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and back to the town of Gaspé before bedding down for the night in Chicoutimi. Everywhere he went, Ryan was trying to stop the bleeding. But as the day made clear, events were out of his hands; the polls were consigning him to defeat and developments on the constitutional front made clear that he was only a spectator. In Sept-Iles, he learned that the high court of Newfoundland had found for the provinces in their challenge of the Trudeau resolution on the constitution. In the Magdalen Islands, he ascertained that Ottawa had decided to refer the whole business to

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the Supreme Court. He should have been elated by the day’s turn of events, for from the beginning he had argued that parts of the resolution were unconstitutional, as the Newfoundland court had found, and that the only way to break the deadlock was for Ottawa and the provinces to return to the bargaining table. Yet with Pierre Trudeau in retreat, Ryan seemed somehow removed from the process, as he stood on a runway in the Magdalen Islands, answering questions from reporters who had no hope of filing in time for the supper-hour deadlines. And when he finally came to rest in the Kingdom of the Saguenay, he would receive no respite. The next day, he was awakened by a telephone call from a Montreal radio station asking for his reaction to Trudeau’s resignation. Ryan took the call seriously, and had to be reminded by his assistant, Pierre Pettigrew, that it was a poisson d’avril – an April Fool’s joke. Typically, Ryan told the story on himself at a breakfast meeting with the traveling press corps, who did not seem to take it as evidence that he was sympathetic, only that he was naive. Later in the day, he went on to Roberval and Dolbeau, before flying home to Montreal. In the accounting of the campaign on election night, the Liberals would lose every last one of the ridings Ryan had visited in the grueling two-day swing around the province. For Ryan, perhaps the cruelest joke of the campaign occurred on the plane that night when television reporter Ralph Noseworthy placed a newspaper cutout version of a papal crown on his head. Ryan laughed and everyone on the flight took the joke in the spirit in which it was intended. But instead of showing his human side, the newspaper photos of the reporter’s prank seemed to illustrate the haplessness of a man with whom the press took liberties. In other words, a loser. In the closing week of the campaign, Ryan drove himself harder than ever. On April 7, his bus rolled up Highway 20 from Montreal to Quebec, where his staff hoped Ryan would have his picture taken with Pierre Trudeau at the gala premiere of the film version of Roger Lemelin’s Quebec classic, Les Plouffe. Somehow Trudeau was late flying in from Ottawa and Ryan had to leave the reception at the Château Frontenac before his arrival to attend a campaign event in Ste. Foy. Instead, Trudeau arrived on the arm of the film’s star, Denise Filiatrault. It was the front-page picture in all the papers the next day, and it was the most eloquent testimony to the end of the referendum era and its associated divisions within the Quebec family. For on another opening night, November 15, 1976, Filiatrault had been one of the artists who ushered in the Lévesque era on stage at the Paul Sauvé arena in Montreal. Ryan tried his own monster rally the next night at the Paul Sauvé. Like the Soirée Pierre Trudeau eleven months earlier, it was intended to

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be a show of strength in the pq heartland of East End Montreal. Because comparisons would be invited to the Trudeau meeting, it was important that the Liberal organizers fill the arena with an enthusiastic crowd, which they did without difficulty. But every one of the 9,000 activists in the arena that night could have been doing other things like knocking on doors. The rally was the usual case of a big risk for small gains, the sure sign of a losing campaign. The newly disciplined Ryan got on and off in the space of twenty minutes, and made one of the strongest speeches of his career, in plenty of time, for once, to be reported on the late news. The organizers could only hope the reports would be generally positive, creating the impression of momentum where none seemed to exist. “What else can we do?” asked senior organizer Jim McCann, defending the effort and resources that went into the meeting. “We need a break.” But they were not about to get any kind of break. The Liberals approached the final weekend of the campaign with a grim sense of foreboding. It was not long before their worst fears were realized. At the end of the afternoon on Friday, April 9, Pierre Bibeau sat in a corner of La Niçoise, a restaurant across the street from the Gilford office. He was about to receive advance information on the Sorecom poll that would be published in the next day’s Gazette. And he had been warned it would not be good. Bibeau had been quoted at the beginning of the campaign as saying “we have better instruments than polls,” referring to the party’s system of supposedly fool-proof pointage. But he knew better. Besides, he also knew Sorecom was Sorecom, and that Maurice Pinard was not somebody off the street. He braced himself for the worst by beginning the conversation with a double scotch on the rocks. He soon had reason to order another. The Sorecom survey showed the Liberals trailing in every region of the province except the West Island. It was worse for the Liberals than the previous Pinard poll. Ryan had actually slipped a point in the last two weeks, to a 45 to 37 deficit. Pinard’s analysis to appear in the next day’s paper indicated the pq was heading toward “certain victory,” and probably a sweep in the range of 76 to 84 seats. Bibeau accepted the news calmly, and did not seem unduly surprised. “There’s no doubt,” he said about his opponents, “that they’ve cleaned us in the campaign.” Still, he would not altogether abandon hope. When they looked at the breakdown in the Pinard numbers the next day, they couldn’t believe they were trailing by twenty-six points in the Ottawa Valley. If so, they wouldn’t win a single seat on Monday (Pinard explained this aberrational situation as something that occurs

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in closely clustered groups of voters, and said the final figures were adjusted to reflect this fact). Bibeau and his people had another way of looking at it. They took the 45 to 37 pq lead, and gave themselves the full four-point margin of error, which made it a 41 to 41 ballgame. They then gave themselves the usual two-thirds of the undecided vote, and figured they would come out ahead 51 to 45, crossing the finish line on empty, but nonetheless the winners. “Stop being so depressed,” Bibeau cheered his troops on the Saturday afternoon. As for Ryan, he finished the weekend, telling supporters in Longueuil to “keep your chins up.” In a reflective mood, Ryan sounded a dominical theme, telling supporters that the whole thing was now in the hands of a “superior force” and that “the Father’s will be done in the final analysis.” It was a genuine statement of his beliefs, and it was a touching way of saying it was all out of his hands now. But when his political managers heard about it, they were horrified. It was the Hand of God business again. On election day, Ryan was out to vote early in the first wave of pensioners and nuns at a school a couple of blocks from his house in Outremont. He ran into Maurice Sauvé, who had been chief organizer for Jean Lesage all those years ago. Sauvé showed Ryan the same optimistic way of working over the Pinard numbers, and figured it could still come out to a Liberal majority of about sixty-six seats. Ryan agreed with him. It was the only time all day he would come out ahead. Behind the scenes at a Montreal television station that night, Paul Desrochers was serving as a human backup for the cfcf television computer. Desrochers, with former party treasurer Claude Desrosiers, had already figured it out. In a Liberal party pamphlet with the pictures of all 122 candidates, he had already crossed off about 80 before the broadcast began. It was a night of a certain settling of accounts for Desrochers, whose services had been refused by Ryan. It was Desrochers who would “call” the election for the pq about half an hour after the polls closed. The score was 49 to 46 in the popular vote, 80 to 42 in seats. The polls had been closed for more than three-anda-half hours, and the election had been lost for more than two hours before Ryan finally turned up at his virtually deserted headquarters at the cegep Vieux-Montreal. By the time he got there, only a few dozen supporters were left in the room. The Liberals remained true to their tradition of leaving a sinking ship, as they had deserted Bourassa in droves on election night in 1976. One thing you had to admire about the Péquistes: win or lose in every election and referendum since 1970, they always stayed till the end. Ryan, who had looked like a sore

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winner in the referendum, was a gracious loser on this April night. “I congratulate the Parti Québécois and its leader,” he began, “and I wish them a fruitful mandate.” “We’re still with you Mr. Ryan,” Bibeau had assured him as he entered the hall after driving down from his riding in Lachute. Ryan knew better. As for his own future, he told the television audience, it would be discussed at the appropriate time with the competent officials of the party. He didn’t get a chance to finish. Across town, René Lévesque had heard enough, and decided to get on with his triumphal entry at the Paul Sauvé, and television went with the winner. It was a time to recall that Paul Desrochers had been told by a wise old man in a rocking chair that whoever won the referendum would lose the election, such was the shrewdness of the Quebec voter in building a system of checks and balances into the ballot box. Ryan himself had once been given the devil’s own choice in a question as to which he would rather win. He had answered without hesitation: “the election.” But now he had lost it. After all his work, he had lost everything, and won nothing.

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18 Ryan: The Final Days

Afterward, when the ordeal of his leadership had passed, even Claude Ryan could not remember the moment he had decided to give up his losing battle to stay on. “I can’t say with any precision, I can’t be sure in my own mind,” he said as he left the tumultuous news conference where he officially threw in the towel. It was the afternoon of August 10, 1982. The scene was a jammed salon of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. Most of Ryan’s friends, and a good many of his political enemies, were in the room. By quitting the leadership, six weeks before a scheduled review at a party policy convention, Ryan was recognizing the grim reality of the situation. The leadership review was lost. If Ryan insisted on fighting it, he would be humiliated. As his brother Yves had observed the previous winter, it was unthinkable. In a sense, Ryan had been moving inexorably towards this decision since the night of his defeat, a year and a half before. He frankly acknowledged the leadership problem in his concession speech on election night, allowing as how his status would be discussed with those competent authorities within the party. On the morrow of his defeat, there was hardly anyone in the party who did not consider himself qualified to give an opinion on the leadership question. Anyone who had knocked on a door during the previous weeks knew what the situation was with the voters. The professional cadre within the Gilford Street group was horrified at the campaign Ryan had run, and infuriated that he would not listen to their advice until it was too late. Looming already in the wings were the

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figures of Raymond Garneau and Robert Bourassa. Garneau, from his corporate perch as chairman of the City and District Savings Bank in Montreal, was nominally out of politics. But he hadn’t forgotten his own bitterness after the 1978 leadership defeat, and Ryan’s subsequent stand-offish treatment of him. As for Bourassa, he surely remembered Ryan’s remark in 1979 that he should forget about making a comeback for the next ten years. Bourassa, despite his efforts on behalf of the referendum, had been unable to win Ryan’s acceptance. Ryan still regarded him as superficial and obsessed with polls. On election night in 1981, Bourassa was in the fortunate position of having been rejected as a candidate by Ryan. Since the campaign had been built on Ryan’s shoulders, it stood to reason that all the recriminations would now fall on his head. So the ranks of the disgruntled on April 14 quickly became a cast of thousands, from the rank and file to the cousins in Ottawa, from the party pros in the Gilford shop to the unreconstructed Garneau and Bourassa loyalists, who had kept their mouths shut for years. It would not be long for a consensus to shape up that Ryan would have to go. Ryan himself was not averse to leaving, but he warned that he would not be pushed. “To be perfectly frank with you, I would be the first one to be relieved,” he said privately in the autumn of 1981. But he added that he would permit no palace revolts. In a sense then, his mind was already made up. But there were two other points on his agenda for the fall which, in his own mind, took priority over the leadership issue. At a general council meeting of the party in September, Ryan was determined to return to the question of the Liberal constitutional perspective. For himself he was determined to return to some of the nationalist-federalist positions he had espoused during the Le Devoir years. It gradually came into focus for him during an actual summer vacation, his first in years, that he took on Cape Cod with his wife and family during the first two weeks in August. “A defeat forces you to return alone to yourself,” he told Graham Fraser of the Montreal Gazette. “Then you are obliged to face your conscience, to look yourself in the mirror and say to yourself, ‘Who am I?’ and you define yourself accordingly.” Walking alone on the sands of the Cape, Ryan came to terms with himself. He would return to his own intellectual sources, and his own understanding of Quebec’s role in Canada. On vacation, he wrote up the first 125-page version of the electoral post-mortem he would deliver in the next month in Quebec. As winnowed down to fifty-five typewritten pages, Ryan read it in his habitual style, head bowed over the text. For him, as always, the message was the medium. For those who took the trouble to hear him

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out on an objective basis, it was the most concise and logically rigorous explanation of why the Liberals lost. In spite of their internal reforms of finance and organization, in spite of increasing their share of the vote from 34 to 46 percent, they still got swept aside by the pq. “We must face the following facts,” Ryan said. “First, our clientele is older than the pq’s. Second, our clientele is more geographically concentrated. Around 60 percent of the people who voted for us on April 13 live between Montreal and the Ontario border. Third, our clientele is a strong majority among anglophones and the ethnic communities, but it’s a minority among francophones. Fourth, our clientele is clearly in the minority among young people and unionized workers.” Ryan was making it brutally clear in electoral terms the party wheel horses would understand: the party was out of touch with the mainstream of Quebec voters. And so he came at length to the part of the speech that would be remembered for his Québec d’abord pronouncement that the party had to put Quebec and its interests first. “We must perceive ourselves, think, act and take positions as a party that is fundamentally and resolutely Québécois,” he said. For those who might have reservations about this, he noted that “the Albertans do the same.” Render unto Ottawa that which is Ottawa’s, and unto Quebec that which is Quebec’s. Between the positions of the federal Liberals and the interests of Quebec, “the first loyalty must be to Quebec, and not to the federal Liberals.” The speech created a sensation, though not exactly of the kind Ryan had in mind. It clearly drew the lines in the party for the imminent battle over the constitution. Just a week later, on September 28, the Supreme Court issued its ruling, 6 to 3 in favor of Ottawa’s legal right to act unilaterally, but 7 to 2 on its moral obligation to consult the provinces as an unwritten part of Canadian constitutional convention. What did it mean? “Legally,” said Michel Robert, by now Ottawa’s lawyer on the case, “it means we won. Politically, it remains to be seen.” For the Ryan Liberals, it meant confusion, fear and loathing in the ranks for the remainder of what was for many of them, the longest week of their lives. By Friday, October 2, the National Assembly would vote on a government resolution calling Ottawa back to the bargaining table and opposing unilateral patriation. The resolution was mild and ambiguous. It could have been written in Ryan’s office. It was certainly drafted with a view to obtaining his support. Ryan and thirtytwo of his colleagues would vote with the government. Nine would not. But the dissension in the ranks ran even deeper than indicated by the

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33 to 9 split. By most inside accounts, about half the caucus was prepared to break with the leadership on this issue until House Leader Gérard D. Lévesque called every debt he had outstanding. In the process, for the first and only time during his quarter century in politics, Lévesque made some enemies in the party. He asked mnas to vote with the leader not for Ryan’s sake but that of the party. He pleaded, cajoled and threatened. All week long, all along the Liberal corridor on the second floor of the National Assembly building, the ferocious arm twisting and lobbying went on. “You won’t believe the pressure I’m under,” said John Ciaccia, the dissenting mna from Mount Royal which, federally, just happened to be Pierre Trudeau’s riding. For Ryan, the choice was between the cousins and the larger interests of Quebec. For the dissenting mnas, the choice was defined by their constituents as between Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque. With the constitutional conference of the “last chance” in November, the Quebec Liberals again found themselves irrelevant to the constitutional process. They found Lévesque using the October resolution, “adopted by all parties in the Assembly” as one of the Quebec delegation’s talking points. Meanwhile, as the talks went on and there was the suggestion of a straight swap of Ottawa’s Charter of Rights for the dissenting provinces’ Vancouver amending formula—the one which accorded a veto to no province, Ryan found himself reduced to sending a telegram to Lévesque warning him urgently not to give up the veto. It was a message for posterity rather than the present. Lévesque, ditched by his erstwhile provincial allies in the middle of the third night of the conference, did not have to give away the veto. He simply lost it. For Ryan, the November accord reopened the constitutional bitterness. Again he was squeezed between the feds and the Péquistes. For he supported the basic minority-rights package of the charter; he supported mobility rights; he was prepared to define reasonable compensation in the opting-out clause of the amending formula. But he also thought none of this should be imposed on Quebec, and he could make a very good argument that Quebec’s veto claims constituted part of the constitutional convention as defined by the Supreme Court, since both Jean Lesage and Robert Bourassa had exercised de facto, if not de jure, vetos in the past. Once again, the Quebec Liberals were torn. Once again, Trudeau had put Ryan in a bad position. In the end, Trudeau extended financial compensation to the cultural and educational fields, as demanded by Ryan and a good part of his own Quebec caucus in Ottawa. This represented a kind of victory in absentia for Bourassa, who had once coined a slogan called “cultural sovereignty,” which was what the refined amending formula amounted to for all the provinces who chose to exercise it.

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For Ryan, there were no moral victories, only more hard times in the National Assembly. He could at least be thankful that the November accord turned the pq on itself in a runaway December convention that gutted “association” from the party platform, renewed the emphasis on independence and suggested that a simple majority of seats in the next provincial election would be enough to set the process in motion. Lévesque was forced to threaten his own resignation and finally had to waste months running a junk-mail “Renérendum,” which reaffirmed the pq’s commitment to gradualism, fair treatment of minorities and the need to obtain a clear majority of votes rather than seats in a general election before setting the independence process in motion. During this period, the Liberals resumed their discussion of the leadership issue, and over the Christmas holidays, Ryan had a long look at it himself. As whenever he was faced with an important career decision, Ryan invoked a family council with his brothers, Mayor Yves and Judge Gerry. And as always among these three plain-spoken men, there was straight talk. “You have a very steep hill to climb this year,” said Yves, for twenty years the mayor of Montreal North, and by far the most colorful and pragmatic of the three brothers. “I think you can do it, but you have to know, is it still possible?” And the way of measuring that, Yves continued, was to go back and see if the people who were with him at the beginning of his leadership could still be counted on. If they were still there, Ryan must fight. If they weren’t, Yves conceded, it would be “an abject situation” to see his brother go down at a convention. When you cut through it all, Yves said later, it comes to two choices: “either he stays or he quits.” It was the best and most forthright advice Ryan would receive, and in the end he would stick by it. But in the winter of 1982, he wasn’t quite ready to quit. “There are two notions of political action that confront one another in the Quebec Liberal party,” he said, just before another general council meeting on the last weekend of January. “The first is to demolish your opponent and win elections. The second concept is one of ideas, and the putting together of a program that you would apply in power. On all the evidence, I represent the second. If there’s no room for that, then I have no place there, but I won’t leave without a fight.” There was a contemptuous edge in Ryan’s voice as he talked about those of his critics who asked for anonymity in their dealings with the press. That, he said, “I find reprehensible.” For the rest, he betrayed none of the sadness and bitterness he must have felt from his defeat. “If

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he had no bitterness, he’s no Ryan,” his brother Yves said in a revealing appraisal. “If he had bitterness and didn’t show it, he’s a Ryan.” By the spring of 1982, Ryan had developed a certain sense of humor about his predicament. After a Canadian Club speech in Montreal in May, a reporter asked him if he felt like taking the Métro, a standing joke from the days when Ryan used to boast of meeting people on the subway. “Not today,” he answered with a laugh. “Maybe when I return to private life, which some people would like to see sooner rather than later.” It would be sooner, but the problem was coaxing Ryan to resign rather than pushing him out, to make him see that it was his duty as well as in his best interest to quit. The summer of 1982 would prove decisive. By Labor Day, the party delegates would be chosen on a slate basis for the leadership review. Ryan had to make the fight or know that he didn’t have the numbers. And so he would have one last go round at seeing what had become of the Draft Ryan forces of 1978. If he could pull them together, he would stick it out. If not, he would leave. In late June, an informal committee formed around Ryan in a lastditch attempt to ascertain whether he had the votes on review. There was Guy Saint-Pierre, the former trade minister in the Bourassa government, who had served as president of Ryan’s leadership campaign. There was Jacques Lamoureux, the whiz-kid organizer, who had been pushed out by Bibeau in the reorganization that followed the convention. Now, at Ryan’s request, he was back. As André Ouellet’s organizer on the federal level, he also had an idea of where the sympathies of the feds lay. There were two loyalists from the caucus, Thérèse Lavoie-Roux and Pierre Fortier. There was John Parisella, former West-End organizer who would see how the non-francophone rank and file shook out. There was Jean Corbeil, the mayor of suburban Anjou and his son Michel. There was Ryan aide Michel Gaudette and Jean-Pierre Hogue, an industrial psychologist, and husband of Ryan’s private secretary, Claire. On Wednesday, August 4, the loyalists went through it with Ryan one more time. The outlook was decidedly gloomy, even worse than at the beginning of the summer. “The assessment a month ago was that it could be turned around,” Saint-Pierre observed. Now they had the individual and collective tasks of reporting that Ryan’s support had collapsed in virtually all segments of the party. Saint-Pierre, for one, had taken on the assignment of persuading prominent Liberal personalities outside active politics to sign a petition in support of Ryan’s continued leadership. In fact, the names on Saint-Pierre’s list said something about the real

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nature of his assignment, which was to present Ryan with the starkest reality possible, and nudge him ever so gently to the decision he finally took. There was no way, for example, that André Raynauld was going to sign. He had quit politics a year before, quite bitter about Ryan’s treatment of him dating back to the period of the Draft. There was no way that Claude Forget, who had left the previous fall, would sign either, or he wouldn’t have left in the first place. But the big surprise was Claude Castonguay of Quebec, former social affairs minister in the first Bourassa government, and a man who now collected corporate directorships the way some people collect wine. He wouldn’t go along. Castonguay was at once the symbol of the party’s intellectual establishment, the leader of the Grande Allée crowd and a man with entrée into every boardroom in Montreal. He had always enjoyed a cordial relationship with Ryan – in 1978 they had an understanding that one wouldn’t run for the leadership against the other. Saint-Pierre reported that he came up empty, dead empty, in his quest for prestigious names. Ryan, taking notes, said nothing. But he was shaken to the marrow by Castonguay’s refusal to sign. Saint-Pierre was not the only one to bear gloomy tidings. LavoieRoux had the job of rounding up caucus support. She had only four names out of forty-one, other than Fortier and herself: Herb Marx of D’Arcy McGee and Reed Scowen of Notre-Dame-de-Grace, neither of whom reflected the sentiment of his riding association; Christos Sirros of Laurier and Daniel Johnson of Vaudreuil-Solanges. Sirros was devoted to Ryan and Roux, but again did not reflect the sentiment of his predominantly Greek, Italian and Portuguese rank and file. Johnson was genuinely loyal to Ryan – “I always said I would support him for as long as he stayed” – but he was also suspected of protecting himself from the accusation that he was grasping for the throne. Here again, one name stood out by its absence, Gérard D. Lévesque, the House leader who had faithfully stood by Ryan as he had stood by Robert Bourassa and Jean Lesage before him. Gérard D., the ultimate party man, wouldn’t sign. If there was going to be a battle, he would stay above it. But there would be no battle, as it became brutally clear to Ryan. Just as his support had collapsed within the establishment and the caucus, John Parisella had had no luck with the leadership of the English-speaking community. The only note of cautious optimism was struck by Gaudette, who thought the constituency battle was shaping up reasonably well. But Ryan was not blind to the evidence of two meetings that had already been held in July, in Charlevoix and Rimouski. In North-Shore Charlevoix, he mustered only four of sixteen delegates. If Ryan decided to

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press ahead with the process, it was clear he was in for a series of humiliations, whatever the final result. They could put off the decision, and take one more run at rounding up support, Saint-Pierre ventured, but he didn’t think it would change much. “Let’s face it,” Saint-Pierre said later, “if he had decided to go ahead, he would have had to go through to the first of September.” Sometime before he went to bed that night, Ryan decided that he couldn’t and wouldn’t. He had followed Yves’s advice to the letter, and found it wasn’t there. “The inner circle,” as the younger brother later observed, “started to show cracks. That’s what did it.” The older brother had another way of appraising the situation. “You have to consider the popular will” he told Brian Mulroney, one of the people who was urging him to hang in. Ryan still remembered the fourteen-point handwritten checklist of do’s and don’ts for a leadership campaign that Mulroney had written up for him in 1978. And while he was undoubtedly gratified by Mulroney’s supporting advice now, Ryan was too much of a realist to carry on much further. On the morning after the round table at the Bonaventure hotel, Ryan had one last round of phone calls and consultations in his study, where only four years before a stream of visitors had come on bended knee to beg him to run for the leadership. Ryan’s mind was probably made up, though he didn’t altogether let on to visitors like John Ciaccia. But Ryan knew he was short of a bare majority of delegates, to say nothing of a strong majority on review. “Unless you can rally the support of a good majority,” he told Ciaccia, “that’s too high a price to pay.” The same evening, Ryan went to visit his 82-year-old mother, Blandine, at the Berthiaume du Tremblay nursing home in the North End of Montreal. He informed her of his decision and then went over for a visit with Yves, the man Gerry Ryan still called “the baby brother.” There, in the mayor’s elegantly appointed office, the middle and youngest brother spoke as friends and confidants. “I might as well tell you I’ve taken my decision,” Claude began, “It’s finished. I’m going to resign. I just have to work out the modalities.” Ryan’s first instinct was to put the word out to the press immediately, leaving the caucus and party to fend for itself. Yves prevailed on him to do it the right way, with elegance, to avoid the taint of bitterness. “You’ve got to take the most gallant, the most civilized way out,” he insisted. He even urged his brother not to slam the door on remaining as interim leader, in the unlikely event he was asked to stay on. At his office on Friday, Ryan informed the members of his leadership defence committee and his two private secretaries, Claire Hogue and Josette Poliquin, that he was quitting. The rest of the staff, including his chief organizer, Pierre Bibeau, were left to learn about the decision

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in an exclusive story in the Saturday edition of La Presse. It was not a story written based on rumors. It had a hard, authoritative edge to it, and carried the by-line of Michel Roy, now editorial page editor-inchief at La Presse. Maybe Ryan felt he owed Roy one for past loyalties. Maybe Roy just happened to call Ryan on this Friday afternoon for a chat. In any event, he had himself a big story, and the whole town started running at midnight Friday to catch up. One unfortunate Gazette reporter, rousted from his bed by the desk, was given the unenviable assignment of waking Ryan for confirmation at 2:30 in the morning. Ryan would neither confirm or deny, but he was not amused about being called in the middle of the night. For the rest of the weekend, he went into seclusion. On Sunday morning, a few journalists who knew Ryan’s habits turned up on the steps of St. Viateur church, around the corner from his house in Outremont. Ryan wasn’t there. He and Madeleine went to Mass instead at the Carmelite convent on Côte St. Catherine Road. But by Monday, he was ready to receive visitors. And they came in a steady stream. Gérard D. Lévesque, summoned from his holidays, was informed he would again have to assume the interim leadership. Ryan told him he knew he would do his duty, even if it meant sacrificing whatever ambitions of his own he might entertain for the leadership. Another caller was Daniel Johnson, back from a Maine vacation, who did have leadership ambitions of his own. “You’re not ready,” Ryan told him bluntly, although he did not rule out his support if Johnson were to emerge as the stop-Bourassa candidate. “How do you feel?” Johnson asked. “It’s done, it’s finished,” Ryan replied. Another visitor was journalist Jean Rivard, who had been a defeated candidate in 1981. On the morrow of the defeat, Ryan commiserated with him, telling him he felt like he’d been hit by a two-by-four. Now Ryan said he was leaving unfinished his goal of reforming the party. “With another year I could have come through that, and transformed this party,” he said. It was perhaps his one great regret, even more so than the sadness over losing the election. Yet even those who had turned against Ryan, partly because he had turned against them, maintained that he was the right choice at the time, the man the party needed for the referendum battle. In this perspective, there was a good deal of rationalization, of people explaining why they were for Ryan then, and weren’t now. Then, he had been chosen to give the party a new image of intellectual and financial rigor; as a man of the middle, the third option, between Quebec and the status quo. He was all of that and more, though it never

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occurred to people then that the cause could carry the day on its own. Just as his importance was magnified by the leadership process in 1978, so were his faults enlarged in defeat. He had brought much of it on himself, by his inability to command the continuing loyalty of the very people who had begged him to come into the game. By the time he left in the summer of 1982, only a scattered remnant of the original organization remained. Only Pierre Mercier would say, when it was over, “I still think he’s the best man for the job.” And Mercier was fighting his own battle, a losing one, for his life. Three months later, he was dead after a long struggle with cancer. And so Ryan came at last to the difficult moment of facing the media and announcing his resignation. In the crowd were some of his former staff who had come back, his executive assistant Pierre Pettigrew, who had gone on to become an official in Trudeau’s Privy Council Office, his former press secretary, Michèle Bazin, and former mna Solange Chaput-Rolland. Jacques Lamoureux was there, acknowledging he’d told Ryan it was too late. And Guy Saint-Pierre and the others. They were not with him any more, but they would see him to the door, give him his hat, and wave goodbye. At least there was that much dignity to the occasion, and Ryan invested it with a good deal of his own. “I doubt that the support on which I could count,” he said frankly, “would have sufficed to ensure an affirmative vote of confidence in my leadership at the policy convention in September. So he was giving his notice, quitting before they could fire him, as of the end of the month. He said he felt “serene and free,” and he looked it. When the press inquisition was over, he made his way out of the room as he had hundreds of times, kissing women on both cheeks, and grasping men’s hands in that pumping movement of his. Except he wasn’t campaigning any more. He was just going out in his own way, in his own good time.

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19 Bourassa Redux

On summer evenings, you could hear the voices drifting up from the river as a tour boat went by Robert Bourassa’s country home on the St. Lawrence at Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel. “They used to announce that this was the summer residence of the premier, and then everyone would boo,” he said one August evening in 1979. “Now they say it’s the summer residence of the former premier. Only nobody boos anymore.” He told the story with that ironical sense of humor he had always reserved for unguarded moments with his family and friends. And he also told it with just the slightest trace of satisfaction. The murmurs from the river were Bourassa’s own private poll, and they told him that summer that the mood of the province was shifting. The same voters who had dumped him without ceremony in 1976, were developing a nostalgia for his administration less than three years later. Where they had seen him as weak and irresolute, they now began to acknowledge the difficulties of governing in Quebec. Even René Lévesque, the darling of the trade unions, had been hit by tough public service negotiations that would culminate in a disastrous hospital strike in November of 1979. Even Lévesque’s administration, for all its “favorable prejudice” toward the trade union movement, would not be able to prevent mid-winter transit strikes in Montreal. As for Bourassa, in the summer of 1979 his name began to be associated with happier economic times, and with the boom and the pride of the mammoth James Bay construction project, which he had nurtured along in the early to mid-1970s. There had been horrific cost

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overruns, bringing the job in at $16 billion. And there had been big trouble on the worksite, going back to March of 1974, when a man named Yvon Duhamel bulldozed a power generator to the ground. Bourassa had appointed a high-powered inquiry led by Judge Robert Cliche of the provincial court, and the spectacular proceedings of the royal commission introduced the public to one of its members, a young Montreal labor lawyer named Brian Mulroney. The Cliche Commission hearings into the late winter of 1975 reinforced the impression that the government was weak and losing control of the province. The cost overruns of the Montreal Games in 1976 also did not improve the Bourassa administration’s prospects for reelection in that Olympic year of 1976. Driven from office by the voters in November, defeated in his own East-Central Montreal riding of Mercier, Bourassa seemed well advised to take a long and probably permanent rest from public life. He went to Europe, to study the workings of economic federalism in the common market. He went to teach in Paris. This period in his life was described then and later as an exile. And so it was. But it was not a wandering, aimless exile. It was a planned and purposeful sojourn, and it was meant to create a space for Bourassa in the referendum, whenever it came. He told his wife as much on the night of his defeat: he would be back for the referendum. And then, in suite 2100 of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the defeated premier made a second decision. He went to bed. Andrée and Robert Bourassa couldn’t have gone home anyway that night. There was a steady procession of horn-tooting cars past their modern stone house on Maplewood Avenue in Outremont and the occasional beer can was tossed in the general direction of the driveway. The next few weeks were hard on Bourassa. He did his best to give Lévesque a smooth transition. Ten days after his defeat, he paid a final courtesy call on the lieutenant governor, Hugues Lapointe, and left Quebec City in the back seat of a rented Pontiac. The premier’s Cadillac would remain behind in a government garage. Gone were the other trappings of office, the executive jet, the bodyguards and the remainder of the entourage, for which Bourassa could be grateful. Only one man rode with him, Jean Prieur, his 35-year-old chief of staff and close friend, who would take much of the defeat on his own shoulders. A year later, when the stigma was lifting, Prieur wryly insisted that “the blame is all mine. I refuse to share it with anyone else.” But in those first weeks, it seemed Bourassa was entirely to blame, blamed by the party for risking and losing power in an unnecessary election, blamed by the federalists for putting the country at risk, and blamed by the intellectuals like Claude Ryan.

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He had been able to live with the scorn of his contemporaries, but he was disturbed in those weeks that he would be forgotten by his friends and neglected by historians. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, four weeks after the defeat. “My phone doesn’t ring as much as it used to.” He was sitting in a private salon of the Chez Son Pére restaurant on Park Avenue, the same room that had always been reserved for him during his premiership on Mondays and Fridays when he was in Montreal. Now, over a three-hour lunch and unusually copious amounts of wine and cognac, Bourassa finally unburdened himself to a small and sympathetic audience of two friends. One of them offered a meaningful solace. For Brian Mulroney was still feeling wounded and abandoned from his own defeat in the Conservative leadership in February of that year. In the days after his defeat, he received a call from Robert Bourassa inviting him to lunch. The premier did his best to console him with the fact that he had run well for a longshot and nearly won, and that there might yet be another day. Now it was Mulroney’s turn to wave aside Bourassa’s concern that, in the flower of Péquiste euphoria, he would be forgotten by history. “Give it time, Robert, you’ve got to give it time,” Mulroney said. “In a few years, compared to these guys, you’re going to look pretty good.” It seemed like the kind of unfounded Irish optimism for which Mulroney was known to his friends. But by the summer of 1979, Mulroney’s words of solace were beginning to have a prophetic ring to them. Compared to these guys, Bourassa was beginning to look pretty good, and he hadn’t yet started seriously to rehabilitate his name. To his surprise at first, and then to his gratification, he found that the voters remembered him, and linked his name with the prosperity of the Bourassa years rather than the troubles which had beset his administration. Not only had they stopped booing, they were cheering at the James Bay site when Bourassa walked unannounced into the workers’ cafeteria on the morning of October 27, 1979. It was the kind of ovation most politicians would like their advance men to rent with the hall, foot-stomping, whistling, with people standing on tables. “Well received?” snorted his friend Jean Drapeau, who knew how to read a room after nearly a quarter century as mayor of Montreal. “More than well received.” It was the inauguration of the huge LG-2 damsite, 600 miles north of Montreal, that would eventually produce 5,200 megawatts of electricity. Bourassa had been the political patron of James Bay, had dubbed it the “project of the century” when unveiling it in 1971. He

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had celebrated his fortieth birthday at the site in 1973. All the blame for the labor troubles and the cost overruns had been heaped on him when James Bay was looking more like the white elephant of the century. So it stood to reason that he would not be forgotten now that his seemingly misplaced faith in the project was about to be vindicated. Amazingly, in one of the more brazen attempts at political highway robbery, the Parti Québécois administration tried to steal all the political credit for itself. It was too much even for the government’s many admirers in the Quebec news media. Memories weren’t as short as all that. It was only in 1973, after all, that the pq was scorning hydroelectricity as a thing of the past and hailing nuclear power as the wave of the future. In the fall of 1979, René Lévesque’s braintrust tried to hitch James Bay to the pq’s referendum wagon. Needless to say, they weren’t offering Robert Bourassa a ride. At first, there were rumors that he wouldn’t even be invited to the opening ceremony. In the event, he was placed in the eleventh row of vips in the workers’ arena, where Lévesque walked onstage like some kind of Ed Sullivan to open a really big show. But by then, Bourassa had stolen the show, simply by turning up at the press room that morning, and in the cafeteria that noon. The previous day’s newspaper supplements had been full of stories. “Bourassa’s dream comes true,” The Gazette proclaimed over eight columns of a full-page feature on the origins of the project, and the former premier’s return from the land of the political dead. But back to what? He was still only forty-six years old in the fall of 1979, and it was hard to determine where he could play a useful role in the affairs of the Liberal party. Only the previous March, Claude Ryan had pointedly suggested that he might think about a comeback in about ten years. That seemed to foreclose the possibility of his seeking a seat in the next election. In those days, Bourassa would wistfully observe that it was too bad Canada did not have a tradition like England, where a former prime minister could sit as a private member, as Edward Heath did in the British House of Commons. Ryan, who was riding high in those days, was more likely to point out that Heath had been left out of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet upon the Tories’ return to office in May of 1979. But there was nothing Ryan could do about the way Bourassa had positioned himself for a role in the referendum debate, and rehearsed his arguments with student audiences. From the beginning Bourassa had staked out for himself the issue of monetary policy and the territory of the college campus. The issue was too arcane for most politicians, the territory considered too hostile for most federalists.

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Bourassa had recognized early on that the question of monetary union was one of the structural flaws in the pq’s program of sovereignty-association. Lévesque would be asking for a mandate for a sovereign nation which, through a monetary union with Canada, would not have control of its money supply, one of the most important features of a sovereign state. And he ridiculed the proposal in a way the ordinary voter could appreciate. In the name of pride, he said in the referendum debate, Quebecers were being asked to create a country which would have the Queen of England on its money. Eventually, Lévesque felt the heat, and not without some annoyance he assured Quebecers that they’d still have the Queen on their precious dollars for a few years yet. Parizeau felt the heat, too, in a debate with Bourassa at Collège L’Assomption in his own riding east of Montreal in January of 1980. Parizeau arrived looking harried and distracted from the heavy concerns of the finance minister’s day. Bourassa arrived looking serene and ready. It was a moment for which he had been preparing for three years and more. The cameras rolled, the students listened, the two of them talked, and soon the perspiration was glistening on the brow of the normally unflappable Parizeau. Sovereignty, he blurted out at one point, wouldn’t cost the average voter any more than a case of beer a year. He was referring to the transfer payments that would be lost from Ottawa, and if he was trying to vulgarize the issue, he succeeded. That night at least, the witty and urbane Professor Parizeau was no match for the more intellectually rigorous Professor Bourassa. For while Parizeau spent his days closeted with his officials, Bourassa had been leading the life of a visiting professor here and there, here at Laval and the Université de Montréal, and there at the Fontainebleau of Paris and Johns Hopkins in Washington. Students found him well informed, forthcoming and surprisingly sympathetic. At Laval, teaching a course on political economy, he was voted the most popular teacher in his faculty. One thing he was discovering as he went along, and that was Quebec students were intensely interested in the referendum issue, and were not necessarily a monolithic bloc of voters for the Yes. But if he had developed an appealing style and a quick rapport in the classroom, Bourassa was moving into the bigger lecture theatre of the referendum campaign. From the federalist perspective, there was not much competition for these podiums, not from the cousins in Ottawa and not from Ryan’s people down on Gilford Street. Certainly neither federalist clan was in a hurry to send someone else in against the likes of a Pierre Bourgault, who may have mellowed with the years, but had

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lost none of his eloquence or his ability to carry a hall with his cries for an independent Quebec. “I fought hard and alone,” Bourassa said later, “in all those places that were considered more or less hostile territory.” No cegep was too remote, no service club too small, to receive a visit from Bourassa. One night he was driven home from Chicoutimi, some 250 miles northeast of Montreal. He slept in the back of the car during the overnight drive, and went out to do an event a few hours later. On a spring afternoon in 1980, passengers on the five o’clock train from Quebec to Montreal noticed the former premier sitting at the back of one coach, his feet up on a facing chair, munching on an apple, and correcting term papers. It was April 17, and Bourassa was coming from a news conference where he had at once been welcomed to the ranks of the referendum leaders, and restored to respectability in the Liberal party. Sitting alongside Jean Lesage, Bourassa heard the virtues of his administration extolled by the current leader, Claude Ryan. The former leaders were held to be living examples of how the Liberal party had built the modern state, financed generous social measures, and brought prosperity to Quebec, all under the Canadian federal system which they had constantly striven to improve. It was Lesage who stole the show, at his first news conference in nearly ten years, and the last one of his life. For the most part, Bourassa was content just to be there, as part of the continuity and tradition of the Liberal party. From that day, he needn’t have worried about his welcome on any referendum stage or party function. On the three-hour ride to Montreal, Bourassa left no doubt that the No forces would prevail, in spite of the winds then blowing in the other direction. “We should have a good 58 to 42 score,” he said. He turned to the mood in the universities. The students he saw were in a mood to listen, and his pitch was to ask why they should renounce a larger Canada for a smaller Quebec, when “the quality of freedom in Canada, the quality of social progress, the quality of our economic well-being makes it one of the very best countries in the world.” He had openly challenged students to name a better country, and none had been able to do so. This was Robert Bourassa, the man who had so often stood accused, not without reason, of practising checkbook federalism, of being in it strictly for the transfer payments. It was also recalled that Rene Lévesque and a few others had met in the basement of Bourassa’s Town of Mount Royal townhouse in 1967 to discuss the possibility of breaking away from the Liberal party. Bourassa had broken with them that night, partly because it made

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no economic sense, and partly because it did not correspond to the political path he had chosen for himself. After Lévesque’s departure, he would remain in the Liberal party, and within three years he would be its leader and premier of Quebec. He won an election in 1970, with a campaign the media called “profitable federalism,” but he won no hearts. And he remained under suspicion in the federalist clans for the remainder of his premiership. To the other side, he looked like a marionette of Ottawa, especially after the October Crisis of 1970, when Pierre Trudeau, nominally at Bourassa’s request, sent the armed forces into the streets of Montreal. For his part, Trudeau evidently shared the former perception, especially after the constitutional talks at Victoria in June of 1971, when the premier of Quebec reneged on a patriation and power-sharing agreement that would have been the centrepiece of the prime minister’s first mandate. It was not over something significant like an amending formula that Bourassa rejected the deal. The Victoria amending formula—with its veto for any province, such as Quebec or Ontario, with 25 percent of Canada’s population—accorded a veto to Quebec without granting it special status, thus giving both Trudeau and Bourassa what they wanted. The disagreement came over the sharing of powers and funding of social programs, and the 37-yearold premier acceded to the advice he was receiving from two quarters—Claude Morin, the deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs, and Claude Ryan, the publisher of Le Devoir. Bourassa, mindful of the image of the puppet dangling on Ottawa’s string, decided at the last minute not to sign. It was the most serious misjudgment of his premiership, for as later events were to demonstrate, it was one thing to exercise a de facto veto, as Bourassa had done and as Jean Lesage had done before him, and quite another to claim a de jure veto which the Supreme Court would not uphold, as was the case with René Lévesque in 1981. The approach advocated by Ryan and the others had been an unbending insistence that there could be no agreement on patriation and an amending formula until the new power-sharing arrangements were worked out. But in retrospect it is clear that had Bourassa signed the Victoria accords of 1971, he would have gone into the history books as the man who secured Quebec’s veto claims. He could at least maintain that he had upheld the veto by his action, as René Lévesque would lose it by his. Bourassa’s pragmatic approach to the problems of an evolving federal system seemed to satisfy no one in the 1970s, not the cousins in Ottawa, and not the nationalists in Quebec. Nor did his language law of 1974, although some English-speaking citizens developed a nostalgia for the easier strictures of Bill 22 after Camille Laurin came along with Bill 101 in 1977. A majority of English-speaking Quebecers still

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seemed to resent Bourassa as the author of their present misfortune, the man who had caused them to live the Lévesque experience, with their neighbors and children moving out of the province. Few of them would have believed their ears to hear Bourassa in the universities in the spring of 1980, attacking the harsh interdictions of Bill 101 as to the language of outdoor advertising and signs, which were to be only in French. Bourassa pointed out that it was ridiculous to prevent people from putting up bilingual signs in English-speaking neighborhoods. Federalists of all persuasions, French as well as English-speaking, might have been surprised to hear Bourassa defying students to name him a better country in the world for the quality of its freedoms and the permissiveness of its dissent. There wasn’t a society in the world, he would say, that had made as much social and economic progress as Quebec in the last generation. This was a striking departure from the careful approaches to the problems of federalism that had marked his premiership. In the referendum campaign, he spoke for the first time with conviction as to the quality of Canadian life and the opportunities of Quebecers to flourish within it. Bourassa was finding out something that spring, namely that the appartenance canadienne was a sentiment that even many students felt more deeply than was generally acknowledged. There was even room for it among the “soft Yes” voters. For while 59.6 percent of Quebecers would say no to Lévesque’s mandate question, fully 75 percent of the respondents in Maurice Pinard’s referendum poll answered yes to a question as to whether they felt strongly attached to Canada. It was this hidden attitudinal data that told the tale of the referendum vote, and Bourassa was seeing it everywhere he went. In the beginning, Bourassa had imposed himself on the referendum debate, but by April of 1980, he was one of the star performers on the “B” team. Ryan, despite his unflagging efforts, could not be everywhere with the “A” team at once. Only once did Bourassa share the spotlight with the president of the No committee, and that was on a May 6 swing to James Bay. They held a joint news conference where Bourassa went to considerable lengths to state that electricity had not been invented by the pq. The reporters were more interested in asking Ryan whether he would encourage Bourassa in making a comeback. Ryan, already somewhat annoyed by this question, simply said it was too early to discuss it. But he was prepared to recognize Bourassa’s contribution to the referendum cause, and did not hesitate to make use of his talents. And Bourassa, as always, was available. He was most assuredly available to appear on Radio-Canada’s referendum-night broadcast. “It’s your victory,” said his fellow panelist Pierre Bourgault. In a small way, it was, just by the fact of his being there.

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On an afternoon in September of referendum year, Robert Bourassa and Claude Ryan went for a walk together. It was no simple Sunday stroll. They were deep in conversation. There was a by-election coming up in Outremont, the seat Robert Bourassa should have grabbed in 1976, the chance he wanted to grab now. Then he had given it to André Raynauld, his most prestigious recruit for the losing 1976 campaign. Raynauld, an independent-minded person, had grown weary of Ryan’s authoritarian style. Within weeks of the referendum, he had resigned his seat to go back to teaching at the Université de Montréal. All through the summer, Ryan had been annoyed by speculation in the press that Bourassa would attempt a comeback in the historic Liberal riding where the mountain met Côte St. Catherine Road, where the Liberal bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders uneasily with the Péquiste professors from the university, and where Michel Tremblay could find enough material for a dozen plays just by listening in behind the curtains of the swankier salons of Outremont. It was not just another riding, it was a cabinet seat, where the voters expected a candidate to be ministerial material. There was no doubt that Bourassa was a cabinet possibility and for Ryan that was a problem. Even if Bourassa assured him that he had no higher ambition, what was Ryan to do with a former premier in his caucus who was nearly ten years younger than himself and two terms more experienced at running a government? Bourassa had tried to make the case that he could help Ryan, as finance or energy critic, and in any other way the leader deemed useful, even as a simple private member. Ryan had thought about it, was bothered by it, and clearly wished Bourassa would just go away. He was like the mother-in-law tagging along on the honeymoon, Ryan would say in an unguarded, unkind moment. Finally at their September meeting, Ryan let him have it straight, so that there could be no confusion and no misunderstanding between them. “I would rather,” Ryan said, “lose without you than win with you.” For Bourassa, not running in the November 1980 by-election, and the April 1981 general election, turned out to be the best thing that never happened to him. As it became clear that the 1981 campaign was going badly, it was equally clear that Bourassa could not be blamed for it. On the contrary, he was more in demand than ever in ridings where the local candidate and organization didn’t want to see Ryan. And all along the way, as he had in the referendum campaign, Bourassa was picking up ious for the future. In the context of Watergate, he had often been compared to Richard Nixon, by which he was not greatly flattered. But he acknowledged a striking similarity in the way Nixon had been

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out campaigning for the Republicans in the 1964 presidential election and the 1966 congressional campaign, so that by 1968 he had made himself the first choice for president of the party’s rank and file. Bourassa knew that he would have to wait for his opportunity until the end of Ryan’s prospective premiership. But then in the spring campaign of 1981, it developed that Ryan was in danger of losing an election that should have been in the bag. After his own experience of defeat, and his own travels of the province in the 1981 campaign, Bourassa knew that Ryan’s own leadership would be in serious jeopardy if the Liberals lost. On April 13, Robert Bourassa wasn’t going anywhere near a television studio. He stayed at home, watched the result on television, and talked to a few friends on the telephone. One of them was Raymond Garneau who, considering the way he had been treated by Ryan, could be forgiven if he had fallen down laughing. Once, in the days when Ryan was riding high, Bourassa had asked a friend to assess his chances of making any kind of comeback in politics. Maybe one percent, he was told. Bourassa said he put it at five percent himself, but even if it was one percent he would never stop working for it. He was a political animal, and there was no use pretending he was anything else. Even on vacation in Rome with his wife, exactly one month after the election, Bourassa could not resist going to an outdoor rally climaxing Italy’s referendum campaign on abortion. On the way over, he thought he would stop by St. Peter’s Square and take in the Pope’s weekly outdoor audience. Bourassa was standing in the seventh row behind the barricades as the Polish Pope rode into view and then, from only a few feet in front of him, the shots rang out. He recognized the sound and the smell of gunfire. And he saw that Karol Wojtyla was hit. “I was no more than ten feet from the assassin,” Bourassa would recall. “He was in the third row, a few feet to my left.” Bourassa asked himself if this could really be happening, if someone was really trying to kill the Pope. He watched as enraged pilgrims wrestled the gunman to the ground, and saw the police hustle him away. Bourassa stumbled on to the pro-abortion rally, where the crowd was informed the meeting was canceled because of the attempt on the Pope’s life. When Andrée Bourassa heard the shocking news back at their hotel, her first thought was that her husband had been somewhere in the crowd at St. Peter’s Square. He has a way, she thought, of always being where things happen.

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20 From Bourassa to Bourassa

If they wanted to stop Robert Bourassa, they would have to beat him. He had begun his journey in politics as the protégé, if not the child, of the Liberal establishment. But somewhere along the way, they left him off at the side of the road. If he was ever going to make it back, he would have to get there on his own. No longer could he count on the Outremont and Westmount crowds. They were looking for someone else, Anyone But Bourassa, and they would do everything in their power to thwart his designs to regain the leadership he had forfeited with the inglorious defeat of 1976. The prospect of a Bourassa comeback was not regarded with great enthusiasm by the cousins, or by the business elites of St. James Street, or by the significant English-speaking element of the party, or by the remnants of the Ryan crowd, or by a good majority of the caucus. He would simply have to wear down their resistance, or go over their heads to the rank and file. For even before Ryan threw in the towel in the summer of 1982, Bourassa correctly sensed the mood of the party’s activists. This time, they were determined to make the choice themselves. The convention would be won in the ridings, not in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton, or the third floor dining room of the Club St. Denis, not in the Caucus bar of the Quebec Hilton or the snooty salons of the Grande Allée in the provincial capital. While the Liberal elites of Montreal and Quebec still considered that they knew what was best for the party, they had lost control of it. For it had changed in several respects.

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First and foremost, the establishment no longer controlled the party finances, and so was no longer in a position to call the shots from Montreal. Second, Ryan had built new regional structures for the party, putting permanent organizers in place around the province, and party activists had begun to experience and enjoy a degree of autonomy from the office on Gilford Street. Third, Liberal militants around the province came to the conclusions that maybe the party elites to whom they had always deferred weren’t so smart. The establishment had given them Bourassa in 1970, when he was clearly too young and inexperienced for the job. The elites had drafted Claude Ryan in 1978 with their decree that the party needed an outsider, untainted by association with the discredited Bourassa regime, to fight the coming referendum wars. In the end, in the 1981 election, the Ryan experiment had been worthy enough, but a failed one all the same. In the year following his defeat, there was an unmistakable grass roots consensus that the party should turn to a seasoned professional politician. It might well be Bourassa, it might be Raymond Garneau, or it might be Daniel Johnson if he showed himself to be a fast learner in opposition. But first the party would have to settle the question of Ryan’s leadership. In Bourassa’s mind, there was never any doubt about which way that one would go. He knew the party, and he knew the way it had turned on him after 1976, as it had turned on Jean Lesage after 1966. “They’ll get him out of there,” Bourassa said privately on the afternoon of April 13, 1981, a few hours before Ryan’s defeat. As it became clear that evening that Ryan was indeed going to lose, the leadership was suddenly within Bourassa’s grasp again. No longer was Ryan in a position to dash his predecessor’s hopes for a comeback. All Bourassa had to do was avoid a vulgar display of grasping for the throne. All he had to do was keep on with what he had been doing, attending Friday night dinners, Saturday night socials and Sunday brunches, raising money for the party at the riding level, as he did in the fall of 1981. Five years to the day after his defeat, Bourassa was invited to one of those Sunday events at the Holiday Inn in Longueuil in René Lévesque’s riding of Taillon on the South Shore of Montreal. The room was packed with some 400 card-carrying Liberals, who accorded Bourassa a prolonged standing ovation as he left the podium. “It wasn’t like this five years ago,” he whispered to Nicole Petit, the president of the local riding association who had introduced him. But the period of recriminations and critical appraisals had finally come to an end. Only the previous week, the last of three Lévesqueappointed inquiries had come up empty where Bourassa was concerned. Like the Malouf inquiry into Olympic costs and the Keable

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inquiry into the activities of the Mounties, the Duchaine inquiry into the October crisis was able to find no evidence of wrong-doing or bad faith on the part of the former premier. The process of rehabilitation was complete. The comeback had begun. Bourassa would never win a charisma contest, and he had never delivered a memorable speech in his life. But one thing he had learned in his exile was how to be himself. His critics might submit that he still talked in cassettes, that he was still a packaged product, but at least he was now doing his own marketing. In uncounted university lectures and service club speeches, he had finally acquired the self-confidence to speak with nothing more than few notes, or none at all. He had never been able to read a prepared text anyway, and now that he had no choice but to extemporize, he found that he was reasonably good at it. He had always been good at making debating points, he had always been good at boiling down complex material into simple home truths, and he had always been possessed of the kind of singleminded determination that had brought him this far in life. It was not as if he were to the manor born. The Bourassa story is a kind of Horatio Alger saga, told twice over. He was born on Bastille Day, July 14, 1933, the second of three children of Aubert and Adrienne Bourassa, and their only son. Half a century later, he would admit to having been “pretty well” spoiled by his mother and sisters, Marcelle Morin who was five years older, and Suzanne Labelle, two years younger than himself. “There was nothing to prevent me from studying,” he would say. “I wasn’t in the kitchen. At least, I would be the fourth one, the last one, in there.” They lived as tenants on the ground floor of a greystone triplex on Parthenais Street, at the corner of St. Joseph Boulevard. “It wasn’t luxurious but it wasn’t poor,” he would recall. “I would say it was a lower middle-class neighborhood.” His father was an accountant, in all but name, with the National Harbours Board, a minor federal functionary who got into the civil service through his own father. Toussaint Bourassa had been captain of the Port of Montreal. His grandson attended primary school at St. Pierre Claver, a couple of blocks from home at the corner of St. Joseph and De Lorimier streets. At the age of eleven, still in grade school, Bourassa remembered attending his first political meetings in the 1944 provincial election that saw the ouster of Adélard Godbout’s Liberals, the triumphant return of Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale, and the emergence as an electoral force of the nationalist Bloc Populaire. The Bloc Populaire, as Bourassa put it, “were the Péquistes of the

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day,” and he remembered going to a meeting near his house where André Laurendeau, the candidate in the adjacent riding of Laurier and the future editor of Le Devoir, was the principal speaker. The platform was lined with like-minded orators. “They were real good speakers,” Bourassa would recall, “they made a good change from the Union Nationale, who were a bunch of showmen.” Bourassa’s interest in politics did not come from either of his parents. Politics was neither talked around the table, nor banned from discussion in the home. His parents just weren’t interested. He could never really say where he picked it up. He decided quite on his own to attend meetings, and listen to speeches, “because in those days meetings were attended, you went to them, but I decided those things on my own.” In the fall of 1945, the 12-year-old Bourassa was enrolled as a day student at Brébeuf College, the training ground for the elites that the Jesuit fathers had set up at the western approach to Outremont. While Brébeuf may not have been in Outremont, it was very much of Outremont, and the sons of the bourgeoisie, and those who would be, went through there. Robert Bourassa was neither from Outremont, nor of it, but because of the low cost of being a day student, no more than a few hundred dollars a year, his parents were able to afford it. And like Pierre Trudeau a decade before him, he acquired all the intellectual discipline, and learned all the tricks of logic, for which the Jesuits were justly celebrated. And then in May of 1950, just as he was finishing up the first year of his baccalaureate studies, his father died of a heart attack. He was only 57 years old, and there had been no warning of it. “He died suddenly,” Bourassa would say many years later. “It was his first heart attack, and his last. It was a shock, It’s one of the things that marked me the most in life. You always remember it.” Neither had the teenage Robert ever known his grandparents, either on his father’s side of the family, or his mother’s, whose maiden name was Courville. The sudden death of his father “could have created a bit of insecurity,” Bourassa acknowledged, but it did not interrupt his studies. It may have drawn him closer to his family. In the way of people who didn’t necessarily see each other often, they always remained quite close. In her failing years, his mother lived in the Berthiaume-Tremblay home for the aged on Gouin Boulevard in the North End of Montreal. He would go and sit with her for hours. And as long as her health permitted, he would fly her down to Florida in winter with one of his sisters and family to spend a couple of weeks at his oceanview apartment in Bal Harbour.

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As he worked his way through college, and later through law school, Bourassa held down about ten summer jobs. One year he was a toll taker on the night shift on the Jacques Cartier bridge. In those days, the tolls were calculated by the number of passengers, but it was not arduous work. “There was hardly anyone at night,” he would say, “we could have slept for hours.” Another year he worked in a textile plant, one of the sweat shops for which Montreal’s rag trade was still noted more than a quarter of a century later. And for those who always thought Bourassa reminded them of a bank teller, he actually worked two or three summers in a bank, as a teller. When he entered the law faculty at the Université de Montréal in 1953, he immediately went to the head of the class, even as he plunged into student politics. It was a strong faculty in his year. His classmates included Antonio Lamer, who would go to the Supreme Court when he was still in his forties. And there was Jacques Mongeau, later a leading education administrator in Montreal, and an interesting collection of future business and law leaders in Quebec. Bourassa was the first in his class every year, and on graduation won the governor general’s medal. On the student activity side, he wrote for the student newspaper, Le Quartier-Latin, was the youth representative to the France-Canada Association, and was extremely active with the young Liberals. In 1956, as he was finishing his legal studies, Bourassa plunged into the provincial campaign, and became involved to the point where he was sent out to debate Paul Sauvé, the elegant youth minister and heir apparent of Duplessis, who would become premier briefly after the death of le Chef in 1959, only to die in office himself four months later. The assemblée contradictoire was being held in Ste. Scholastique in Sauvé’s own riding of Deux-Montagnes. It promised to be an old-style meeting, packed with truck drivers jeering his unfortunate Liberal opponent. The Liberal candidate came down with a diplomatic illness, a mysterious case of laryngitis. Bourassa was asked to go in his place. A third person wished to speak, on behalf of the Quebec wing of the socialist Commonwealth Cooperative Federation (ccf). His name was Pierre Trudeau. “What do we do with the guy from the ccf?” Sauvé asked his young Liberal opponent. “We don’t have any time to listen to those thinkers.” And so, Bourassa recalled many years later, “We made a deal so that Trudeau wouldn’t speak. He was very angry, and wrote a long article about it in Le Devoir.” It may have been a poor omen for their relationship. It was on the student council at the university that Bourassa met his future wife. She was the representative of a women’s faculty, pédagogie familiale, which was later phased out.

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And she came from a different world. She was the eldest child of Edouard and Orise Simard of Sorel. They were, to say the least, prominent citizens of the shipbuilding town thirty miles east of Montreal on the south side of the St. Lawrence. Simard’s brother, Joseph, had built Marine Industries there from a small shipyard into a going national concern. The brothers did well enough before the Second World War, and their wartime building of ships and armaments for the federal government made them wealthy men. They made a formidable team. Joe Simard was the guiding genius, as reclusive as his brother was gregarious, who hated politics as much as his brother revelled in it, who despised politicians as much as his brother enjoyed their company. The wedding of any of their children – Joe had seven and Edouard had four – was bound to be a big event in Quebec. Hundreds of guests spilled over Edouard’s great expanse of lawn down by the river at Sorel for the wedding of Andrée Simard to a 25-year-old graduate student, Robert Bourassa of Montreal. After their marriage on August 23, 1958, they went over to England where Bourassa completed his economics and political science studies at Oxford. He had made it there on his own, with a $5,000 scholarship from the Royal Society and a grant from the Mackenzie King Foundation, and he would obtain a master’s degree the next year. That first year of their marriage, they lived the bohemian life in a Victoria Road flat with three kinds of heating – gas, electricity and coal. From Oxford, Bourassa moved on to Cambridge, the one in Massachusetts, where Harvard awarded him a grant from the Ford Foundation to study for a second master’s degree in tax and corporate law. During the winter and spring of 1960, they lived in a small apartment on Robinson Street near the university. Andrée Bourassa was pregnant with their son, François, born that year in Montreal. And then the Bourassas settled down for the next four years in Ottawa, where he worked as a fiscal adviser for the Department of National Revenue, and taught economics and taxation at the University of Ottawa, not far from their house on Rideau River Drive. He later recalled that period as the years of decline leading to the fall of John Diefenbaker’s government. And every month, on the day the unemployment figures would come out, Bourassa would arrange to be in the galleries to watch the Liberals go after him. “They had the four horsemen,” he recalled, in Lester Pearson, Jack Pickersgill, Lionel Chevrier and Paul Martin, and when one had finished, the other would stand up and fire away.” It was the proof that you don’t need fifty members to bring down a government. “It was parliamentary debate at its best.”

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By 1963, Bourassa was turning thirty, growing bored in Ottawa, and looking for a way to get back home and into politics. By then, he said, “it was a question of how and when, not whether. In the early days, I might have ended up as some kind of senior civil servant.” Marcel Bélanger provided the how, Jean Lesage provided the when. Bourassa had been doing some work for the federal government’s Carter Commission on taxation. In Quebec, Lesage was in the process of appointing his own inquiry into fiscal policy under Marcel Bélanger. Lesage and Bélanger were looking for a general secretary and research director for the commission. One of the people Bourassa had run into around Ottawa was Carl Goldenberg, the famed labor lawyer and constitutionalist, who was one of those well-connected Montrealers around the federal capital. He also had occasion to settle the odd labor dispute for Lesage, and recommended Bourassa as secretary to the Quebec inquiry. Since Bélanger also wanted him for the onerous job, that just about clinched it. The work of the Bélanger Commission did not make many headlines, for it was not about constitutional or cultural matters, the great preoccupations of the age. And Bourassa would be the first to acknowledge that much of its work was “as boring as the rain.” But it was an epic inquiry, and as Bourassa discovered it touched on every level of public policy in Quebec, from school levies, to municipal taxes, to personal and excise taxes. “It gave me a good chance to deepen myself in everything,” Bourassa said twenty years later. It also gave him the chance to travel into every corner of the province, as the inquiry completed the public phase of its work. It was the origin of his network in the Liberal party. When the work was done in 1965, the young secretary of the commission delivered a copy of the report to the home of Le Devoir’s publisher on Garnier Street in East-Central Montreal. It was one of the first extended conversations Bourassa would have with Claude Ryan, but it would not be the last. “Two days later he had read the whole report, and published the only intelligent editorial on it, he ‘Ryaned’ it,” Bourassa recalled with some admiration. Ryan would have been one person who read the Bélanger report, and Premier Lesage was undoubtedly another. By this time it had been agreed that Bourassa would run for the Liberals at the next election, which Lesage was impatient to get out of the way before the celebrations of Expo year in 1967. In the spring of 1966, only three-and-a-half years since his previous election, Jean Lesage summoned his cabinet to a cabana at the Surf Club in Miami Beach. The election would be held on June 5, a Sunday, and the Liberals had every expectation of winning big.

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For Bourassa, it came down to a choice of two seats, St. Laurent in the West End of Montreal and Mercier in the East End. St. Laurent was by far the easier bet, but with its predominantly English-speaking population, it would make a difficult and delicate base for an aspiring politician with higher ambitions. It was René Lévesque who warned Bourassa not to run there, if he entertained hopes of seeking the leadership some day. “Lévesque was the big star,” Bourassa said, explaining that he had been recruited by Lesage, but approved by Lévesque. And so a word of advice from the most popular minister in the government was not to be taken lightly. “But if Lesage had asked me to run in St. Laurent, I would have,” Bourassa said. “He had asked his organizers to free a good riding for me, and Mercier was rather safe in those days.” It was safe enough for Bourassa, because the Liberals were maintaining their hold on the cities even as the tide was going out for them in the rest of the province. Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson had been out in the boondocks for years, and his Irish charm made a refreshing change from the Gaullist pretensions of Lesage. Moreover, the pace of the Quiet Revolution had been rather too hectic for the liking of many rural voters. And so on June 5, the people reelected Lesage and threw him out at the same time. He had a majority of the popular vote, but Johnson had a majority of seats. Since there was something in this for everyone, the new premier pointed out with considerable mirth, everyone should be happy. The Liberals, who had acquired some dynastic airs during Lesage’s two terms of office, were now nothing more than rulers in exile. For Lesage, the next three years would be the most difficult period of his leadership, when as he later confided to one friend, he had his back to the wall to make sure there wasn’t a knife in it. But when caucus members would sometimes gather to discuss the leadership, kicking names around a table, they would all feign disinterest. Bourassa’s name never occurred to anyone, except René Lévesque. “You’re forgetting one guy,” Lévesque told a group of colleagues, showing them a paper with Bourassa’s picture. For Lévesque, Bourassa had it written all over his face. For Bourassa, the big preoccupation in the first year after the Liberal defeat was keeping Lévesque in the party, or trying to. “I tried to build bridges between Lesage and Lévesque,” Bourassa said in 1984. “For me, René was a bit like Nye Bevan in the British Labour party, a bit left but a good caution against the bourgeois faction.” Bourassa, who regarded himself as a social democrat in those days, went so far as to have serious discussions in the summer of 1967 with

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Lévesque and a few friends as to the possibility of forming their own party, not unlike the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association which Lévesque later founded after he walked out of the Liberal party at its autumn convention. Bourassa always maintained that what he really wanted was to keep Lévesque in the embrace of the Liberal family, that it was “better to have him inside than outside.” In any event, Bourassa told Lévesque, his ideas of sovereignty-association wouldn’t work, that his proposal for a monetary union was so much wishful thinking. Then as later, Lévesque waved off this objection as “plumbing,” the sort of thing you could worry about when the time came. Jean-Roch Boivin, another participant in those discussions, would leave the party with Lévesque and eventually become the premier’s chief of staff after 1976. When Lévesque left, the Liberals lost a prospective heir apparent, certainly one who would have been a serious contender at any leadership convention if he and the party had been able to achieve a satisfactory resolution to their differences over the federal link. And then former Education Minister Paul Gerin-Lajoie, who got tired of hanging around waiting for Lesage to retire, left provincial politics to accept an appointment from the new Trudeau administration in Ottawa. By 1969, the party establishment lacked a candidate at the very time Lesage had decided to pack it in. Paul Desrochers, recruited by Lesage to rebuild the organization after the 1966 defeat, had conducted a survey as to what the voters were looking for in the 1970s, and the answer came back: jobs. The party needed an economic profile, and Bourassa, with his social-technocratic background, fit the description down to the ground. He didn’t have Pierre Laporte’s two terms of experience in government, and he didn’t have Claude Wagner’s way with words. But on the afternoon of January 17, 1970, he had something more important—votes. Even as a freshman member, he had made a favorable impression as the party’s whiz-kid finance critic, and even in those days, he had been available to travel the province on behalf of the party, and was often remembered and well thought of from his days on the Bélanger Commission. But when it came down to the crunch, it was the appointed delegates-at large who gave Bourassa his 53 percent majority and first ballot victory. Or as he said himself many years later: “Lesage had decided it would be me.” And so it was. Premier Johnson’s Unioniste successor, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, unveiled a phantom budget in March and called an election for April 29. Bourassa would triumph, with 45 percent of the vote, to the un’s 19 percent, and the pq’s 23 percent, giving the Liberals 72 seats in the 108-member National Assembly, while the un remained as

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the opposition with 16 seats, the Créditistes won 12, and the pq had only 7 ridings to show for their efforts. Bourassa’s campaign proved to be a triumph, with its single slogan: “100,000 jobs.” But at the outset, the election had been considered too close to call at Liberal headquarters. “We couldn’t measure the impact of the pq,” Bourassa said many years later. “At first, we didn’t know how it was going to come out.” The first Bourassa administration was marked by political crisis and an economic boom. As a 37-year-old freshman premier, he had to live through the October crisis in his first year in office, the Victoria constitutional dustup in his second year, and the Common Front of public employees in his third year. But in 1973, a year of phenomenal economic growth, he decided to go back to the people. He did so on October 29, just before the effects of the new Arab oil politics, tripling the price overnight, could be measured by voters in the western economies. Bourassa started that campaign with a 55 to 30 lead in the polls, and finished there on election day. It was very much a personal triumph for him. For contrary to the commonly held view that Paul Desrochers was calling all the shots, the premier’s special adviser was suffering from a bout of depression that fall, and was not involved in the daily affairs of the campaign. It was really run by Jean Prieur, with help from party treasurer Claude Desrosiers, and Richard Mongeau, the young lawyer from the social affairs minister’s office. It was a great and splendid victory. It was also the beginning of the end. Ten years later, on August 15, 1983, Bourassa officially began his second campaign for the leadership of the Liberal party. His defeat and exile were hardly mentioned, least of all by his campaign staff, who dealt with it in two lines in the biographical sketch they distributed to reporters. “Following the 15th of November, 1976, after ten years in active politics,” it read, “Robert Bourassa began a period of study and reflection.” The study and reflection was of the way back. By the summer of 1983, he had the leadership convention locked up before the first delegates were elected in the ridings. He had made the seemingly impossible appear ridiculously easy. But it was no mean achievement. He had done it by hard work, and by and large, by himself. He had done it by getting out in front and staying there, so far in front that his prospective serious rivals never came into the race. From the beginning, Bourassa later acknowledged, the strategy was “to keep them home.”

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It might have been Raymond Garneau for a while, and then it might have been Gérard D. Lévesque, and there might have been a federal candidate acceptable to the Quebec party, a Francis Fox or an Yvon Pinard, presentable ministers who had not been scarred by the constitutional debate, or did not carry the paternalistic baggage that weighed down other Quebec ministers in Ottawa. Any of the above could have counted on the abb factor, on substantial caucus support, on votes in the anglophone ridings, and on the cousins. Garneau had a look at it and said no in the summer of 1982, and no again in May of 1983, and no a third time in the month of June. He could have counted on important caucus backing, not to mention the support of the feds. Trudeau had Raymond and Pauline Garneau around to lunch at Sussex Drive in early June, urging him to run. With this kind of encouragement, Garneau was obliged to have another look at it. But two weeks later, he received a poll of the party rank and file conducted for him by some friends in the business community. It showed Bourassa leading him by 34 to 25 percent, with Gérard D. Lévesque back at 10 percent, and Daniel Johnson at 8 percent. It indicated Garneau’s strength around Quebec City and the West End of Montreal, but pointed to Bourassa’s strong lead among francophone and youth delegates. Garneau could have forced a second ballot, but it was by no means clear that he would win. It was a big risk for a man who was just settling in as chairman of the City and District Savings Bank in Montreal, who had a chauffeur at his front door in the morning, a membership in the exclusive Mount Bruno Country Club, and a house on Edgehill Road, near the summit of Westmount, with a commanding view of Montreal’s twinkling crown of lights. Garneau was 48 years old, still young enough to have a future in provincial or federal politics, at a time more of his own choosing, when he had provided for his financial security. After thinking about it over the St. Jean Baptiste weekend, he finally said no for the last time. This time, his people believed him, and they began making their way to the Bourassa camp. Marc-Yvan Côté, the whiz-bang organizer from Quebec who had himself just been elected to the Assembly in the Quebec-area riding of Charlesbourg, moved over as Bourassa’s chief organizer. The entire Grande Allée crowd moved onside within a week. The resistance within the caucus collapsed. Garneau turned over his privately-commissioned opinion-poll to Bourassa, and promised his support. When Garneau finally said yes to John Turner in the 1984 federal election, he may have regretted doing so. It was over. It was not as if the establishment had not had a few meetings, as Philippe Casgrain who had attended a few in his time, acknowledged to Bourassa in the summer of 1983. There was still an

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abb movement but by this time, nobody was willing to go public anymore. Bourassa had achieved his primary goal, “to reply to the establishment guys getting together at the Ritz. When they saw my strength, they had to back down.” Even the feds began to change their tune. Trudeau, in Montreal on personal business in mid-June, happened to be lunching at the University Club the same day Bourassa was there with Jim Robb, a lawyer who had long advised him on matters relating to the English-speaking community. Trudeau walked over to Bourassa’s table and they had a light-hearted exchange. But Trudeau also gave an interview to Le Devoir, in which he sounded less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a Bourassa comeback, finally allowing as how he would prefer Bourassa over René Lévesque. “Between cancer and the plague,” Bourassa said angrily after seeing the interview, “he’ll take me.” This was one difference between Bourassa who was returning to the leadership and the man who had relinquished it. He had developed a memory, and he had decided that no one would ever again take liberties with him. As for the feds and their meddling, he would later say that “they went just a bit too far to try and stop me.” He was not unaware that the new Conservative leader, Brian Mulroney, had sent word to Trudeau through a mutual friend to call off the dogs. Mulroney made it quite clear that Bourassa was going to win, and that he was prepared to help him win if it came to that. There was another brief bubble rising over Ottawa in the month of July, when Marc Lalonde kept hearing from people that he should have a run at it. But he knew better, and besides, he was the federal finance minister and the most powerful figure in the national capital after the prime minister himself. There was no compelling reason for him to enter a provincial race, and no guarantee of winning. If anything, a Lalonde candidacy would have sparked a family quarrel between the Quebec Liberals and the cousins that would have torn the party to pieces. It was never on. But at least Lalonde had enough political acumen not to make stupid public statements about Bourassa, as André Ouellet and Jean Chrétien had done. Lalonde angrily told them at a Liberal caucus meeting in June that they had missed an important opportunity to shut up. Ouellet had gone so far as to say Bourassa had been given his chance, and blown it. Bourassa waved him off as the personification of insignificance in politics, to the delight of many of Ouellet’s own colleagues. As for Chrétien, they patched things up over a dinner at the home of Paul Desmarais. By this time, Chrétien was looking to his own prospects at succeeding Trudeau, and it would not help him in his home province

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to make an enemy of the man who was going to be leader of the Quebec party. Bourassa had two adversaries, but no opponents, in the 1983 leadership race. Daniel Johnson was the first to declare himself in the middle of July. He was clearly the candidate of the establishment and the Ryan crowd, or what was left of either. He did not expect to win, but he had every expectation of finishing second. Pierre Paradis, who achieved the ripe old age of 33 in the summer of 1983, was the candidate with everything to gain and nothing to lose, just by being in there. A lawyer from Bedford in the Eastern Townships, Paradis burst on the scene to win the party’s nomination in a 1980 by-election in the riding of Brome-Missisquoi. He had nothing to recommend him for the leadership except a personal network of friends from the Townships and his days at the University of Ottawa law school, as well as the interests of pork farmers he represented in his law practice. But he was not short of moxie. The country lawyer sashayed into town on August 9, to announce his candidacy from the Oval Room of the Ritz, filled to overflowing with enthusiastic supporters decked out in his red and grey badges. When they poured out of the hotel onto Sherbrooke Street, it looked like a convention of Métro-Richelieu dealers going back to the grocery store. Paradis arrived with a bouncy campaign jingle and the slogan, Enfin, as if the whole province had been waiting for his arrival. It was quite a nervy performance, and a very good one. From the beginning to the end of his campaign, he played a cassette about three themes, individual rights, economic recovery and federalism, all dear to the hearts of Liberals. In the crowd that day, somebody observed that the booming, self-confident Paradis sounded like a cross between Ronald Reagan and Camil Samson. There was a distinct difference between Paradis and Johnson. Paradis had the flair without the finish. Johnson had the finish without the flair. Paradis might in time acquire the finish. But flair is something you’re born with, and the 38-year-old Johnson didn’t show much in the summer of 1983. From the beginning, his campaign was terribly organized, thematically confused, based on the naive assumption that the establishment could still call a few shots, and going nowhere fast. Johnson and his campaign team took what should have been a respectable second-place showing and turned it into a disastrous thirdplace finish. He opened his committee room with a crane hosting his name on the sidewalk outside his downtown storefront headquarters on Sherbrooke Street, and with a slogan calling for “A New Liberal

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Leader.” In case the significance of this escaped anyone, he made a rather sharp attack on Bourassa for having led the party into the wilderness. Bourassa, as if swatting flies, replied that Johnson had been in the party of his father in 1976, and that long-time Liberal activists had no lessons to take from him. And at his own campaign launching at Montreal’s Holiday Inn Centre Ville on August 15, Bourassa made it clear that reporters should no longer be familiar with him. What did he say, asked Radio-Canada’s Jean Larin, to those who said he was still surrounded by the same people. “Yes,” Bourassa replied, without missing a beat, “I see we’re still together.” The audience of supporters roared with appreciative laughter. To another question, this time in English, as to whether on the night of November 15 he had ever dreamed of making a comeback, he gave a simple reply: “Yes.” He promised that he would run a campaign “with no zig-zagging and no gadgets,” and reporters were quite welcome to take his picture from any angle they pleased. “I’m getting jowls like Joe Clark,” Bourassa had said merrily at a private dinner a week before his 50th birthday in July of 1983. “It’s funny,” he said. “I don’t feel 50. When I was 20, I used to think that at 50 I would be in my grave.” Bourassa had grown older since his years as premier, without growing old. He had filled out a bit, and his suits no longer fit him like a coathanger. He had even put aside some of his pin-striped, doublebreasted suits for more casual and becoming blazers and slacks. Occasionally, he would even show up at a party function wearing a windbreaker over a turtleneck or open shirt. So he no longer had the underfed aspect that in the old days had caused matrons to take pity on him. Still, he watched his weight by swimming every day, a quarter to a third of a mile. And he still watched what he ate, generally a piece of fish at noon and a steak in the evening. Bourassa’s one self-indulgence would be a glass of Chablis with his lunch or Cabernet Sauvignon in the evening. Among close friends, he might have a Cognac after dinner. What he had learned in seven years was nothing more or less than the chastening experience of defeat. “You know what your power is when you’ve lost it,” he used to say, “And you know what you would do differently.” He had also been the beneficiary of something denied to those who exercise power: time to think. “I will be a candidate for the leadership of the Quebec Liberal party

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at its convention in Quebec on October 14 and 15,” Bourassa began, reading from a prepared statement. This was an appropriate declaration for a meeting held in a Holiday Inn, with a slogan of “No surprises.” Bourassa had a double-tracked program, proposing economic priorities for his party, and attacking the party in power. His five-point program emphasized high technology, opening Quebec to new investment, reducing the interventionist role of the state, making peace with Ottawa, and civilizing relations between Quebec’s public employees and the citizenry. That was the motherhood side of his platform, which he would detail in a series of position papers in the coming weeks. Clearly, he was setting the agenda, rather than allowing the media to do it for him. And he attacked the Lévesque administration with a surprising degree of vengeance and scorn. “Dream merchants,” he called them, “who so recently had all the answers, now have nothing but problems. Their ideology foundered on contact with political reality . . . . Once a source of pride and trust, the Quebec government has been discredited; the major projects are idle, or almost; taxes are higher than elsewhere; the public purse is depleted; regimentation abounds and young people have nowhere to turn.” Andrée Bourassa, one week short of her silver wedding anniversary, watched her husband with a mingling of pride and resignation. Any sense of dread may well have been shared by their 23-year-old son, François, by now a student at the McGill Conservatory of Music. His 17-year-old sister, Mimi, was more at ease and in a sense better prepared for this day. For she had been too young to know the scorn and contempt that François had endured from his classmates during their father’s first time around. She was a perfectly normal, gregarious, boycrazy teenager, who had a well-developed aversion to schoolwork and had her father wrapped around her finger. They had all known this day would come again, and they were prepared to face it together. Andrée Bourassa, with her interests in art history and classical music, had never been fond of her public role as the premier’s wife, and she was not anxious to become public property again. But she was prepared to do it, to the extent that it was necessary, and in the brief two months of the leadership campaign, she sometimes insisted on appearing at her husband’s side, as she did on this August afternoon. She was even prepared to have herself elected a delegate, along with her husband and two children, in his old riding of Mercier. By then, on September 6, the delegate selection process had been under way for a week, and the Bourassa juggernaut was already

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rolling. There were 24 delegates, 12 men and 12 women, including 8 youth, from each of the 122 ridings, for a total of 2,928 delegates to be elected over the three-week selection period. In every riding, it was the Bourassa slate versus the others. No matter how much the other two campaigns teamed up, they could not stop him. When the process was over on September 18, even Johnson acknowledged openly that Bourassa had piled up a huge and probably insurmountable lead of 1,500 votes over his nearest rival. “I’m still confident I can turn the tide,” Johnson declared bravely at a September 19 news conference. But the tone of the day was set by cbc reporter Don Macpherson, who asked if all this wasn’t Johnson’s way of admitting that his campaign was in a shambles. By the time the leadership campaign rolled into Quebec in the days after Thanksgiving weekend, the only suspense was who would finish second. By Saturday, October 15, it was clear that Pierre Paradis had caught up with Daniel Johnson and had passed him. He had indeed come from no place to second place, with 353 votes to Johnson’s 343. As the numbers were being called out, the victor was visiting the boxes of the two vanquished candidates, and he arrived back at his own end of the Quebec Coliseum just in time to hear his own numbers called out. Robert Bourassa, 2,138 votes, or 75 percent, the biggest winning margin in the history of the Liberal party, eclipsing Lesage’s 1958 mark of 71 percent. For Bourassa, it had been a long road back, and it had taken him through every riding in the province. Even when he was running well ahead in the winter of 1983, he cancelled a trip to Florida to make a fund-raising swing through the snowbound Gaspé. Even when there had been a province-wide power failure on the previous December 14, Bourassa insisted on going ahead with an appearance in Rivière-duLoup, where he found that 350 people had waited four hours for him. There was still no power, so they had a very late candlelit supper. Bourassa later said it was the most moving moment of all his years in politics. And into the summer and the fall, he had run the same kind of campaign as his friend Mulroney had on a national level in the spring, down in the boondocks, with no media entourage and no hype. À la Brian, Bourassa said in the summer. And he too, would go all the way. Now it came time to claim the victory and Bourassa, in the obligatory crush of cameras, guards and delegates, made his way to the stage. Oui à un Québec Canadien, he had said in his main address earlier in the day. But this was the more important speech, for the manner in which he took over the party again. Many people in the arena remembered the awkwardness between Ryan and Garneau.

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They needn’t have worried. The affairs of the party were again in the hands of a professional politician. Besides, by the nature of the contest, there were not many wounds to be bound up. And the vanquished candidates played out their scripted roles as gracious losers, while Bourassa sounded the gracenotes of a generous winner. Johnson referred to Bourassa as “my leader,” while Paradis asserted that it was a great and open party that allowed a young man of humble origins to seek its leadership. Bourassa praised them both, and then in the clearest statement of his federalist convictions, said “we have to fight for Canada,” for in doing so they would build a better Quebec. Finally, he went out of his way to acknowledge his wife and two children, “for agreeing to the return to politics.” When he had finished, the sound system boomed out the beat of his convention theme song, “Flashdance: What a Feeling.” He wouldn’t have seen the summer’s hit movie of 1983, but he would appreciate the main lyric of the song: “Take your passion and make it happen.” This was exactly what he had done, against rather forbidding odds. Now he was beginning a second honeymoon with the voters. A Sorecom survey published on the day of the convention gave the Liberals a 61 to 29 lead over the pq. A month later, the gap in another Sorecom poll had widened to an incredible forty points, at 67 to 27. “That worries me a bit,” Bourassa would say in February of 1984. He knew it was too high, knew it would have to come down, but was determined to maintain the floor figure of 50 percent he needed to win an election. Indeed, a crop poll taken in the last days of February and published in La Presse, on March 11 indicated that the pq had finally bottomed out, and narrowed the spread to 61 to 31. Yet Bourassa maintained his high approval rating, for the moment at least, at 61 percent compared to 35 percent for Lévesque. But a subsequent Sorecom survey in June gave Bourassa an incredible 69 to 23 lead over the pq. Even among young voters, the Liberals led by a 3 to 1 margin. Reviewing these findings as he sat in the sun one day in mid-June, Bourassa simply shook his head in amazement. For himself, he was in no hurry to get into the National Assembly before the autumn session of 1984 at the earliest, and if he could avoid the place, he would stay away from it altogether until the election expected in 1985. He had nothing to prove as to his parliamentary abilities, for he had already been there. Besides, the National Assembly was hardly ever in session more than four months of the year. Bourassa could put that time to use back out in the boonies, in the places he had just come from, and in putting his caucus in shape to provide a systematic opposition, and he began the job that October night in 1983 in Quebec with a couple of roundhouse swings at the government.

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From the stage, he went upstairs to do a round of television interviews with the people in the glass booths, and then off into the night, appearing at a party at the Hilton, and another one at the Château Frontenac. A little after midnight, he went home to bed at the Môtel Universel, a rather nondescript place down the street from the swimming pool at Laval University in Ste. Foy, where the owners had been nice to him during the years in exile, and where no one would ever think to look for him. On the Monday, he would have his first caucus meeting there. The mountain would come to Muhammed. The next morning, Bourassa walked into an efficiency room adjoining his own, carrying a small bottle of fbi orange juice. “See if you can open this for me,” he said to an aide. In this respect he hadn’t changed; there was no old or new Bourassa, only the real one, with shaving cream under one sideburn and his shirt tail hanging out. Room service had sent up a mess of bacon and eggs on a cardboard plate, with plastic knives and forks and coffee in a styrofoam cup. Bourassa wolfed it down and made his way out to a car, where a pair of his ever-present rubbers was on the floor of the back seat. In his first political life, someone once pointed out to him on an airport tarmac that he was wearing two pairs of rubbers. He promptly heeled and toed his way out of the other pair, and left them right there on the runway. “You and your goddam rubbers,” somebody mentioned to him. “You never know when you’ll need them,” he replied a bit sheepishly. Bourassa was going down to the Château Frontenac for a triumphal news conference, and on the way down the Grande Allée, the Bunker came into view. “A bad place,” he agreed of the forbidding fortress that housed the premier’s office, sounding as if he intended never to set foot in it again. But if his lead in the polls and his determination held up, he would become premier again, as only Maurice Duplessis had done before him. Already, he had regained the leadership of his party, which no one in Quebec or Canadian politics had ever done before him. “I’m the tenth leader of the party and the twelfth,” he said a few months later. “I replaced my successor.” And whatever lay ahead, he had been given what comes to few people, in politics as in life: a second chance.

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21 Second Debut

After regaining the Liberal leadership in October 1983, Robert Bourassa tried to run out the clock on the necessity of seeking a seat in the National Assembly, in the hope that an election would be called before he had to contest a by-election. He also had other priorities over being in the legislature and spent nearly two years on the back roads of politics, building his party’s support in every region of Quebec. But by the spring of 1985, the pressure was mounting on him to find a seat, even as the pq government experienced the special agony of a leadership revolt against its founding father. “The place of a general is at the head of his troops,” Gilles Lesage noted disapprovingly in Le Soleil. Of all the pundits in the Quebec Press Gallery, Lesage was among the most influential along the Grande Allée, widely respected, widely liked. The buzz that Bourassa was afraid of running in a by-election finally forced his hand, to avoid doing permanent damage to himself with the electorate province-wide, expected to vote in the fall. And so on June 3, he completed the next phase of his path to power when he handily won the riding of Bertrand in “Fortress pq” territory on the South Shore of Montreal. In normal circumstances, Bourassa wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the place. Bertrand was by far the least promising of four scheduled by-elections. The pq owned the South Shore suburbs of Montreal and could put its entire regional organization in on the ground. The only thing that Bertrand offered Bourassa was the convenience of being on the way to his family’s summer home on the St. Lawrence at

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Sainte-Anne-de-Sorel. Furthermore, far from offering him free passage to the legislature, René Lévesque made every effort to defeat him by running a strong candidate, Francine Lalonde, a former union leader with the csn (Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux), whom he had just brought into cabinet from the outside as minister for the Status of Women, an astute choice in a suburban riding full of middle-class women. But in the end, Bourassa defeated Lalonde handily by 57 percent to 37 percent. The pq lost three other seats on June 4, keeping their perfect score in by-elections intact. In twenty-six by-elections since Lévesque first came to power in 1976, the pq had lost every one. For Lévesque, it was more than the beginning of the end – it was the end. No sooner was Bourassa installed as leader of the opposition than Lévesque, in complete disgust with scheming by the pretenders to his throne, angrily announced his resignation at the end of the spring session of the National Assembly. Bourassa was in his car on the way to Montreal when he heard the news on the radio on the evening of June 20. So there would be no fourth and final electoral round between these two leaders, who had been the dominant figures in Quebec politics for fifteen years. His first thought was that Lévesque had been forced out in a coup staged by the party he founded, led by members whose careers he had advanced. “They got rid of him, that’s my view,” Bourassa said in the month of July. He did not even exclude the possibility of a putsch staged by the members of Lévesque’s own entourage. The premier had been in obvious good humor only the day before his abrupt resignation, when all sides paid him lavish tributes in the National Assembly on the twentyfifth anniversary of his first election with the Lesage government in 1960. Between the homage of the legislature in the afternoon and his resignation the next day, Lévesque stopped by his office, where he was confronted with letters from riding associations declaring their loss of faith in the pq and in his leadership of the party he had founded in 1968, and taken to power only eight years later. The latest polling numbers were very bad for Lévesque and the pq, indicating that under his leadership the party would win only 20 percent of the decided vote, without counting the undecideds and “discreets,” who usually broke to the Liberals. These popular vote numbers extrapolated, according to the dark humor in Péquiste circles, to their winning one seat in the Saguenay by a recount. Such was the chaotic state of the pq after all that Lévesque had put it through in the fall of 1984 and the winter of 1985. He had effectively renounced the party’s option of sovereignty, its very raison d’être, in

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favor of the “beau risque” of constitutional rapprochement with Ottawa under the new Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. As a result, the pq was profoundly and irredeemably divided. Seven ministers, including Jacques Parizeau and Camille Laurin, had resigned from cabinet, and many had left public life altogether to protest Lévesque’s abandonment of the party’s sovereignist convictions. In ditching the orthodox wing of his party, Lévesque hoped to attract enough floating votes—moderate nationalists, old-line bleus, and Liberals dismayed by Bourassa’s return from exile—to give the pq a fighting chance at the next election. And indeed, over the winter of 1985, he was moving up in the polls. On the weekend of a pq special convention in January, La Presse published a poll that indicated the party under Lévesque becoming competitive again, down 52 to 39 to the Liberals under Bourassa. But in the same beauty contest, the spread closed to 46 to 43 if Pierre Marc Johnson were leading the pq. In the end, all Lévesque had succeeded in doing with his swing away from sovereignty was to promote the candidacy of Johnson as the leader of the pq’s moderate wing, while demobilizing the party’s orthodox faction. But beneath the beauty-contest aspect of polling on leadership and party preference, a sea change had occurred in the attitudinal data underpinning voting intention. As Bourassa knew from the Liberals’ own polling by Sorecom in a sample over thirty provincial ridings, more than 80 percent of respondents thought it was time for a change. For all the popularity of Pierre Marc Johnson as a New Age politician leading the “affirmationist” wing of the pq, Liberal polling indicated that even he would lose his seat in an election under the banner of Lévesque’s leadership. In June 1985, the Liberals led the pq by a stunning 26 points, 45 to 19, with countless pq voters parked on the sidelines. So Lévesque quit in anger, but he was also pushed, and perhaps putsched. “They dumped their founder,” Bourassa observed. “They dumped a sitting premier.” But with Lévesque’s departure, the game also changed. A beautycontest poll by iqop found that Bourassa’s lead shrank to a single point, 32 to 31, over Johnson and just three points, 32 to 29, over Pauline Marois. Bourassa called this the supermarket question, in which shoppers were offered dozens of different cereals, but ultimately went to the cash with corn flakes in their shopping carts. “The question is hypothetical and meaningless,” he said with a dismissive wave. “The respondents aren’t even asked to express a party preference.” As for party preference, Bourassa had already seen to it that the polarization between the Liberals and the pq would be complete, with no third parties to split the opposition vote. He had dealt with that threat in January 1985 at a meeting with Prime Minister Mulroney in

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the executive boardroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal. In the wake of Mulroney’s 211-seat sweep of the country, including 58 of 75 Quebec ridings in September 1984, support for the Union Nationale, the old-line Quebec bleus, zoomed from the low single digits to an astonishing 17 percent. Moreover, a Joliette lawyer and municipal affairs activist named André Asselin was organizing a provincial Conservative party, with the active support of some former un officials and Tory organizers. As a party that had just come into office in a national landslide, the Conservatives would have had more than a coattail effect in a provincial contest—they would have a freeloading effect. “The timing would have been ideal,” Mulroney acknowledged years after he had himself left office. “The continued absence of the Conservative party in Quebec had made it hard for us nationally. So the timing would have been ideal, but the split of the federalist vote would have reassured the election of the pq for any number of years. It would have been the end of the federalists. No doubt about it.” There was no doubt, either, that Mulroney was not prepared to let that happen. If he were going to reopen the constitutional file, in an effort to gain Quebec’s signature on the 1982 Constitution Act, he would prefer to deal with a federalist party in power in Quebec. “I can tell you there will be no Conservative party here without the approval of the party leadership,” said the prime minister after his 1985 meeting with Bourassa. “We haven’t been consulted on this, and we don’t know these people.” Left unspoken was the obvious: anyone organizing in behalf of, or doing business with, the nascent Quebec Conservatives would be struck from the federal patronage lists. Such is the implicit discipline of a party in power. Also left unspoken was a quid pro quo in the sense that Bourassa had put Bibeau and the Liberal machine to work for Mulroney’s Conservatives in many ridings where they had no organization of their own, exploding the myth of a federal Big Red Machine. As Mulroney had himself observed, “There was never a federal Liberal machine in Quebec, just Trudeau and the provincial Liberal machine working for him on the ground.” Standing beside the prime minister at the Ritz, looking like the cat who had just swallowed the canary, was Robert Bourassa. As Pierre Bibeau, his chief organizer put it, “We couldn’t have asked for more.” Afterwards, Asselin might as well have been a leper begging for alms. The perceived threat of a Tory third party splitting the federalist vote disappeared from Quebec’s political radar screen. Even so, Asselin himself ran a strong second in the June by-election in L’Assomption, finishing less than 4,000 votes behind the Liberal

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candidate, while the pq was a distant third in Jacques Parizeau’s former riding, east of Montreal. That was the kind of vote-splitting threat that Asselin’s Conservatives might have posed in francophone ridings off the island of Montreal, had they been well financed and received the blessing of the governing federal Tories. Meanwhile, Bourassa moved into the pre-campaign period with the launch of his book Power from the North, which was intended for two publics: the voters and influential U.S. financial markets and policymakers. At home he was reminding Quebecers of his credentials as the father of James Bay i, even as he proposed to spend $25 billion on James Bay ii, which could bring another 12,000 megawatts of capacity on line there and on Quebec’s North Shore. To Bourassa’s great surprise, Power from the North, intended as the main economic plank in his campaign platform, actually sold quite well. With 10,000 copies in French and another 4,000 in English, it qualified as a Quebec and Canadian best-seller. “Who would buy that?” he asked. “It’s a stream of statistics.” It was to resonate at home, to strike a pose as an international figure, that he chose to launch his English edition, with a foreword by former U.S. energy secretary James R. Schlesinger, in Washington. Assuming he returned to office, he was also counting on the Americans to finance the project on Wall Street and buy surplus output for the Northeast. Fifteen years later, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Bourassa’s vision would be vindicated, with the deregulation of the electrical industry in the United States and surging demand in the power-starved northeastern states. In 2000, Hydro-Québec’s export sales to the United States exceeded $1 billion, some of it surplus thermal power bought from the United States, stored overnight by the Quebec utility, and then resold to the Americans at needle-peak prices. Even Bourassa hadn’t foreseen that development. But he did foresee, in the summer of 1985, another issue that would resonate on the Quebec and Canadian public policy agenda at the end of the twentieth century—water. Quebec had it in abundance, from Ungava Bay in the north to Mississquoi Bay on the U.S. border. As for Canada, as he noted in the closing chapter of his book: “With much less than 1 percent of the world’s population, we own no less than 27 percent of the world’s supply of fresh and usable water.” Bourassa had included this chapter almost as an afterthought, taking up the brainchild of Montreal engineer Thomas Kierans, who proposed a Grand Canal, whereby water from James Bay could be moved to the U.S. As events would turn out, the Grand Canal project attracted some prominent supporters, notably Simon Reisman, father of the Canada–U.S. Auto Pact, who would become Canada’s chief negotiator

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of the 1988 Free Trade Agreement. Reisman’s support for the Grand Canal scheme provoked paranoia among Canadian nationalists, who saw water as an issue of sovereignty. Yet bulk water exports were never included in the fta talks or in the subsequent negotiations leading to the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, both of which Bourassa strongly supported. The only water in either deal was bottled. However far-fetched the Grand Canal proposal may have been, it fit with his grand design of exploiting Quebec’s vast energy resources to drive employment growth. While he knew that the pq would dismiss the concept as a fantasy, and some caricaturists might draw him as a hewer of water, he retorted privately: “They can call it what they want. I call it creating jobs.” While Bourassa was laying the economic groundwork for his campaign over the summer of 1985, the pq was running a leadership race. Pierre Marc Johnson was the heavy favorite to succeed Lévesque, but the race for the party presidency and premiership was a crowded one. Bernard Landry and Pauline Marois, who would wait fifteen years for the opportunity to lead Quebec as premier and deputy premier, were the leading candidates of the party’s orthodox nationalist and social democratic factions. The ineffable Jean Garon also joined the field. The race for the pq presidency marked the first time a leader was chosen by universal suffrage of party members, rather than by slates of delegates. The outcome was never in doubt. Before Lévesque left office, party pollster Michel Lepage conducted a poll that indicated Johnson as the choice of fully 75 percent of pq members. In Montreal on September 29, the pq convention confirmed him as the easy winner on the first ballot—but not before all his rivals had spoken, thus depriving him of the opportunity to speak to Quebec in television prime time. In a scene eerily reminiscent of George McGovern accepting the 1972 Democratic nomination in the middle of the night, Johnson did not get on the air until well after most Quebecers had given up and gone to bed. It was an unfavorable omen for his leadership, rather like the cold autumn wind that blew through Montreal that Sunday night, a foretaste of winter. Still, in terms of personal preference, Johnson ran far ahead of Bourassa in attitudinal polling. “So what?” Pierre Bibeau said many years later when he had resumed his role as chief Liberal organizer under the leadership of Jean Charest. “We had those hard numbers in favor of change.” The Liberals were also as ready for an election as any party could be. Through his incessant tours of Quebec, Bourassa had built an impressive campaign organization supported by 250,000 party members, as many as belonged to the pq at its peak in the pre-referen-

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dum period. The Liberals were also financially flush, with a $5 million campaign war chest. As well, they had Bourassa, whose remarkable political intuitions were now reinforced by his considerable experience as a leader. He was confident that he had done his work in the regions well. And he was certain that the desire for a change of government would not be satisfied by a change of leadership in the governing party. “As long as we maintain our floor figure of 50 to 52 percent,” Bourassa surmised in the last week of the November campaign, “we may even move up to 53 percent.” While the Liberals were confident they could force the issue of change, they also wanted to present a group image representing renewal. Bourassa would not be out there alone, but supported and surrounded by candidates with impressive credentials on economic and constitutional issues. For the economy, there were Pierre MacDonald, the top executive of the Bank of Montreal in Quebec, and Paul Gobeil, executive vice-president of the Provigo grocery chain, both dropped into safe Montreal ridings and both destined for senior economic portfolios. On the constitutional front, a leading authority, Gil Rémillard, was running for the Liberals in the Quebec City riding of Jean Talon, the heart of the Grande Allée and a traditional cabinet seat. To emphasize the team, the Liberals produced a television campaign spot of several star recruits sitting in shirt sleeves around a table with Bourassa, projecting an informal but businesslike atmosphere. Bourassa’s long-time adviser Jean-Claude Rivest observed that he still tightened up when the camera was turned on. Renowned for his mordant sense of humor, he told Bourassa he had done everything to prepare for a career in politics—law, economics, and a royal commission—except for one thing: he should have done some theatre. For the Liberals, the issues were not simple, but they were easily framed. Nine years of pq government had dug Quebec into a huge deficit hole. Bourassa needed to reduce the deficit and improve Quebec’s creditworthiness in financial markets. Its debt had quadrupled during the Lévesque years, while Quebecers groaned under the burden of being, as Bourassa put it, “the most taxed society in the free world, or at least North America.” Moreover, the Quebec economy was still recovering from the deep recession of 1981–82. For the voters, the issue was jobs, which had also been Bourassa’s issue going back to the 1970 election. But he reluctantly recognized that he also needed to open the door on the question of Quebec’s absent signature from the 1982 Constitution, patriated from Westminster, with an entrenched Charter of Rights, over the specific objections of both parties in the National Assembly. In

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Remillard he would have an articulate advocate of Quebec’s conditions for signing. So the stage was set in the fall of 1985—a change of government, proposed by the Liberals, or merely a change of leader, proposed by the pq. Whichever side could define and force this issue would win the election. But Bourassa also knew that the current of history was running in his favor. Not since the 1956 election, the last campaign of Maurice Duplessis, had the incumbent party received a third consecutive mandate. On October 23, Johnson dropped the writ for a December 2 election, calling for “serenity and lucidity in building a Quebec that has grown to full adulthood and is in search of excellence.” He had some things he could do to project the image of a sitting premier. Johnson’s strategy was, first, to remind the voters that at thirty-nine he represented generational change—indeed, that he represented an entirely new generation, the baby boomers, born after the Second World War. As well, Johnson wanted to make the case for his “affirmationist” outlook of co-existence with Ottawa in two areas, the economy and federal-provincial affairs. So he went to a First Ministers’ Conference in Halifax and obtained Mulroney’s agreement for a campaign announcement that Hyundai, the Korean auto maker, would build an assembly plant at Bromont, in the Eastern Townships, the second in Quebec after the General Motors plant at Blainville, north of Montreal. Then Johnson and Mulroney announced agreement on a formula that would enable Quebec to participate as a full member of La Francophonie, an idea whose time had finally come. As a student in Quebec City, Mulroney had been mentored by Daniel Johnson, when he was in opposition as leader of the old un. Now as Prime Minister, he admitted an affection for Johnson the younger, the first of two brothers who would briefly occupy the premier’s office. Indeed, after Johnson’s defeat in 1985 and his resignation of the pq leadership in 1987, Mulroney would name him co-chair of the National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment. The creation of the French-language commonwealth had long been stymied by a deadlock with Ottawa over Quebec’s role, with France refusing to go ahead until Quebec was at the table as a full partner. In the resolution of this dispute, which dated back to the 1970s, it was agreed that Quebec would be a full participant in its sovereign area of education as well as in culture, and Ottawa would take the lead on foreign affairs, the economy, trade, and other international issues affecting the French-speaking world. The initiative enabling the creation of La Francophonie would prove to be Johnson’s one enduring

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achievement as premier. And the Quebec delegation at the inaugural conference in Paris in February 1986 would be led by Premier Robert Bourassa. Going into the campaign, Bourassa knew that he couldn’t lose, so long as he made the issue a change of government, rather than a change of generations. That meant running an error-free campaign and wresting control of the agenda from the news media, particularly the Quebec Press Gallery, not known for its federalist propensities any more than for its fondness for Bourassa. But on the first point, he was a wily campaigner who knew how to satisfy the demands of the daily news cycle without taking undue risks. And on the second, he liked nothing more than a good scrimmage with les boys, especially when the game was played on his terms—economics and statistics—where the press was seriously overmatched. Typically, at Rimouski city hall, just six days before the election, a voter wanted Bourassa to promise then and there to extend the fourlane Highway 20, la Transcanadienne, downriver from Rivière-duLoup, where it turned south to the Maritimes. This was a perpetual campaign issue in the Lower St. Lawrence, especially in Rimouski and Matane, the gateway to the Gaspé Peninsula. With an eye to les boys, bent over their notepads in the front row and timing their videotapes at the back of the hall, Bourassa gave one of those evasive answers for which he was justly famous. Not right away, he allowed. “But that doesn’t mean,” he quickly added, “that we can’t reactivate the file, to see if a schedule can’t be established, if not in the near term, then certainly in the foreseeable future.” Bourassa’s reply drove the media to distraction. In a long day that had begun at 7:30 in the morning at Dorval airport in Montreal, with stops in Jonquière and La Baie in the Saguenay region and then across the St. Lawrence to Rimouski and Matane, the press corps had been trying to pin Bourassa down on the cost of his platform. They might as well have tried to nail jelly to the wall. At every stop along the way, he would do the ritual scrum, which left them no better informed. Out of thin air, he had conjured up something he called “the margin of maneuver” in the current provincial deficit, which he used to justify his campaign promises, put at anywhere between $400 million and $600 million, depending on the day of the week. In other words, the cost of his platform wasn’t the issue—change was, something the media travelling with him undoubtedly sensed but refused to acknowledge. For his part, Bourassa was delighted by this game, played according to his rules and in his area of expertise. Reporters who had known him earlier in his political life also noted that he had developed an edge in his dealings with them that had been

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conspicuously missing in his previous incarnation. The Bourassa of the 1970s had urged reporters to “call me Robert.” Such familiarity was a thing of the past with the Bourassa of the 1980s. “The chess game he played with reporters had a harder edge as well,” noted veteran correspondent Graham Fraser of The Globe and Mail. “Often, he would put down a reporter with a firmness he had never shown before. He once said to me, ‘If you had been with the campaign last week, Mr. Fraser, you would have known that I dealt with that question then.’” If it was Tuesday, it must have been Rimouski, and Bourassa had been there many times over the previous two years, for riding fundraising suppers, nomination meetings, and the like, so that when he turned up in the campaign he couldn’t be dismissed as a fair-weather friend. He knew the terrain and he knew local and regional issues, top to bottom. This eighteen-hour day would end at 1:30 the next morning in Val-d’Or, where Bourassa would do a breakfast event before turning his campaign plane home for Montreal. With only five days to go before the election, the Liberal victory was a foregone conclusion, and it was only a question of how high the tide would rise. On the evening of December 2, 1985, Bourassa was in a swimming pool as the polls closed, just as he been on another night nine years earlier. But this time, election night would bring another result, more like 1973 than 1976. His sense was that the Liberals would win over 50 percent of the popular vote, translating into about 85 ridings in the 122-seat legislature. But the Liberals would do better than that, sweeping 56 percent of the popular vote, even higher than Bourassa’s 55 percent vote in the 1973 landslide and fully 10 points higher than Ryan’s 46 percent in 1981. The pq’s popular vote shrunk to a disastrous 38 percent from 49 percent in 1981. Johnson himself barely held on to his Montreal riding of Anjou, and no fewer than 19 of his 29 cabinet ministers went down to defeat, including Bernard Landry and Pauline Marois. But for one riding, his own, Bourassa would have won 100 seats. Even as he swept the province, he was repudiated by the voters of Bertrand, who returned home to the pq, electing Boucherville mayor Jean-Guy Parent over Bourassa by 326 votes. They had been offered a premier, but instead chose a mayor. A bad choice, as it developed, when it became clear that local files, such as the Petromont refinery, would no longer be priorities in the premier’s office. It was the first time in Quebec history that voters had chosen a government but rejected its leader. For Andrée Bourassa, it was more than she could bear. “You’d think Robert had no merit,” she said bitterly, bursting into tears on the telephone the following day. Bourassa shrugged it off. “Everyone knew Bertrand was a fortress of

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the party in power,” he said on election night. “It comes as no great surprise.” He went to unusual rhetorical lengths to cover this historic anomaly in his victory statement at the Pierre Charbonneau sports center in East End Montreal. “It’s the third time Quebecers have expressed their confidence in me,” he insisted. The historic defeat of an incoming premier in his own riding would be rectified soon enough, when Bourassa won a by-election uncontested by the pq in one of the safest Liberal seats in creation, the Montreal riding of Saint-Laurent, where in one of those ironic footnotes to history, René Lévesque had urged him to run when he first entered the legislature in 1966. After his swearing-in as premier on December 12, Bourassa summoned the National Assembly into an early session, even though he didn’t yet have a seat. He had a Christmas present for Quebecers—a mini-budget with $75 million in personal and excise tax cuts, as promised in the campaign. He clearly wanted to create the image of a leader who decisively kept his promises. But Bourassa also had no illusions about what lay ahead. “I know that in a month, the honeymoon will be over, and in a year people will be saying all the things about me that they used to,” he said in the summer before the 1985 election. “I couldn’t care less. I’m going to leave my mark over the next five years, and we’ll see what people say in ten years.” He knew he would be judged on three issues: job creation and management of the economy, his capacity to preserve social peace on the language issue, and a settlement of the constitutional issue with Ottawa. And on the issue of leadership—how he had grown and matured since his previous two terms of office, and how he had changed from his years in the wilderness to his restoration. “When you’ve been defeated,” Bourassa mused before his return as Liberal leader, “you think that because you live in a democracy, you must be wrong. In 1976, I was wrong. If Mr. Lesage lost in 1966, it’s because he was wrong. That’s one thing. And there’s no doubt that years of reflection, of study and experience in the business world, and all my meetings around the world, in the United States, Canada, and Europe, have been very valuable to me. In that sense, I’m no longer the man I was.” He had also been hardened by the experience of defeat, but there remained the question of whether he could take on the hard political decisions of governing in the interest of policy rather than the polls. “There’s no doubt that I’ll be tougher,” he said at his fifty-second birthday in July 1985. “I won’t govern in view of electoral fallout. I believe Quebec can’t afford a premier who governs looking over his shoulder

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at the voters. There will be difficult decisions, whatever the political consequences in the short term.” In the January 20 by-election, Robert Bourassa, premier of Quebec, won by a slam-dunk margin of 16,135 votes, sweeping all 194 polls in Saint-Laurent. The Liberal restoration and Bourassa’s vindication were finally complete.

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22 Miracle at Meech Lake

Somewhere over the Rockies, on the way from Vancouver to Montreal, Robert Bourassa was discussing the risks of reopening the issue of Quebec’s missing signature on the 1982 Constitution. “We’re going to have a look at this,” he said, sitting in the business-class section of an Air Canada Boeing 767. “One look. If there’s a real chance of success, we’ll go ahead. If there isn’t, we’ll close the file tight.” As he spoke, in June 1986, the prospects of a successful constitutional negotiation were uncertain, but the mood in the country was good and unusually well disposed towards Quebec. Bourassa sensed this from his visit to Expo ‘86 in Vancouver, where he had participated in its Quebec Day celebrations on June 24. He was warmly received by the crowd, who had come to hear a performance by Quebec pop icons Robert Charlebois and Jean-Pierre Ferland. A decade earlier, Charlebois and Ferland had played to a Saint JeanBaptiste Day crowd of half a million people on Montreal’s Mount Royal in what was known as the “Miracle on the Mountain.” This was an intimate outdoor audience of perhaps 1,500, at sunset on a beautiful Vancouver evening. Both performers connected emotionally with the audience, particularly in the finale, when Charlebois spontaneously changed the title of his signature song, “Je reviendrai à Montréal,” to “Je reviendrai à Vancouver.” The audience responded with cheers and applause. Some were in tears. From a lifetime in politics, Bourassa knew how to read a crowd, and he knew that if francophone stars were getting standing ovations in Vancouver, the country was having one of its positive mood swings

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towards Quebec. Moreover, there was a new political dynamic in the land and new political actors on the stage, ready to turn the page from the Trudeau era and move on to a new chapter in the Canadian constitutional saga. The new prime minister, Brian Mulroney, had been elected in 1984 on a program of “national reconciliation and economic renewal,” pledging that when the time was right, he would seek Quebec’s signature on the Constitution “with honor and enthusiasm.” There was another important player in David Peterson, the new Liberal premier of Ontario, who was intent on restoring the economic and political partnership between Ontario and Quebec as the keystone provinces of Confederation. “You can’t run the country without Ontario and Quebec. It’s that simple,” Peterson observed many years later. Like Bourassa, Peterson sensed that Mulroney’s election would be good for him in that it represented change, and Ontario was ready for change after forty-two consecutive years of Conservative rule at Queen’s Park. Peterson also knew that Ontarians were like Quebecers in another sense—they built their checks and balances into the ballot box. Since Mulroney represented Tory blue in Ottawa, his government enhanced the prospects for Peterson as the standard bearer of Liberal red in Ontario. “Brian’s election was good for me—there were no Liberal governments anywhere in the country after September 1984,” Peterson said, knowing that the federal-provincial pendulum would begin to swing back soon enough. And so it would, with Peterson elected as head of a minority government in May 1985, when he made a two-year pact with ndp leader Bob Rae. Bourassa’s election the following December would complete a new power triangle which Peterson, in a 1985 interview with Quebec columnist Michel Vastel, simply called “Brian, Robert et moi.” “Even if I hadn’t liked Robert, and I did,” Peterson recalled in 2001, “I believed very strongly that the Toronto–Quebec City–Ottawa axis made the country work. Or not work.” Several other new provincial premiers had moved to the federalprovincial stage, unburdened by the baggage of the previous constitutional round, which followed the 1980 Quebec referendum and culminated in the 1982 patriation of the Constitution without the assent of the Quebec legislature. In Alberta, the fourteen-year premiership of Peter Lougheed finally ended in 1985, when he gave way to fellow Conservative Don Getty, a former quarterback of the Edmonton Eskimos, who would host the 1986 Premiers’ Conference, a pivotal event in restarting the constitutional process. In British Columbia, Social Credit premier Bill Bennett retired in the summer of 1986 after a

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decade in office, to be succeeded by Bill Vander Zalm. In Saskatchewan, the ndp government of Allan Blakeney had been replaced by Conservative Grant Devine, who hosted the February 1985 First Ministers’ Conference, dubbed the “Valentine’s Day lovein,” where Mulroney proclaimed a new day in federal-provincial relations. In Manitoba, the right-wing Tory Sterling Lyon had been replaced by the ndp’s Howard Pawley. In Prince Edward Island, the avuncular Conservative Angus MacLean had been succeeded within days of the November 1981 First Ministers’ Conference by Tory Jim Lee, who was in turn followed in 1986 by Liberal Joe Ghiz, the son of Lebanese immigrants, a passionate Canadian who would prove that even the premier of the smallest province could play a significant role on the federalprovincial stage. Three Atlantic premiers—Conservatives Richard Hatfield of New Brunswick, John Buchanan of Nova Scotia, and Brian Peckford of Newfoundland—were the only hold-overs from the previous constitutional round, and as Tories, they were inclined to go along with Mulroney in seeking a constitutional settlement with Quebec. But it was Peterson, among the new premiers, who played the central role. He was quite determined to take up the mantle of his predecessors, John Robarts and Bill Davis, as the honest broker of Confederation. “I also believed very strongly in relationships,” Peterson said, “such as with Don Getty in Alberta.” In the middle of an economic boom, he recalled, Ontario “paid $100 million to buy coal from Alberta rather than Appalachia.” As for the premier of Quebec, he said: “We became very good friends.” Peterson loved nothing more than taking his family skiing at Mont Sainte-Anne, and dropping in on Bourassa in nearby Quebec City. One summer day, they walked up the Grande Allée to lunch, pursued by a horde of news cameras. As they sat on the terrace of a popular restaurant, the owner sent over one of the most expensive bottles of wine in the house. Peterson later recalled that Bourassa sent it back, because he didn’t want the cameras to catch the pricey label in a close-up. Bourassa would occasionally fly to Toronto for lunch or dinner with Peterson at fashionable Italian restaurants such as Prego, and The Toronto Star would just happen to get a picture. On one Toronto occasion, the bilingual Peterson appeared with Bourassa on a joint EnglishFrench radio talk show, on cfrb and cjad in Toronto and Montreal and ckac and the Télémedia network in Montreal and across Quebec. What they were creating, in addition to a personal friendship, was a climate of trust and a sense of partnership between Canada’s two largest provinces.

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In this new atmosphere of federal-provincial harmony, in the spring of 1986, Bourassa would send his Intergovernmental Affairs minister, Gil Rémillard, to make what later became known as the Mont Gabriel speech. The entire constitutional cottage industry—from deputy ministers, to academics, to interest groups—had gathered from May 9 to 11 for a constitutional colloque at Mont Gabriel, the ski resort in the Laurentians north of Montreal. Entitled “Rebuilding the Relationship: Quebec and Its Confederation Partners,” the symposium was organized by the Institute of Intergovernmental Affairs at Queen’s University, whose faculty included leading constitutional thinkers such as Ron Watts and Peter Leslie. Participants included decorated veterans of the bureaucratic trenches, such as Gordon Robertson, former clerk of the Privy Council and later the first head of the Federal-Provincial Relations Office, and Senator Arthur Tremblay, former deputy minister of Intergovernmental Affairs in Quebec. “Everyone was there,” recalled Norman Spector, then deputy minister to the premier in British Columbia, who by summer’s end would be heading to Ottawa to fill a key position in the federal mandarinate—secretary to the cabinet for FederalProvincial Relations. Rémillard was invited to give the keynote address. In his Mont Gabriel speech, he laid down Quebec’s five conditions for signing the 1982 Constitution. A former professor of constitutional law at Laval and author of the massive two-volume Le fédéralisme canadien, Rémillard was perfectly at home with the constitutional crowd. He had entered politics by the front door of Bourassa’s house in Outremont, where he had been invited in October 1985 for some one-on-one persuasion to run in the coming election in the Quebec City riding of Jean Talon, citadel of the provincial establishment. “I was not very inclined to accept,” Rémillard recalled, “because I was working as a special adviser to Mr. Mulroney, trying to find a way to reopen the constitutional file from that end.” Bourassa pointedly had Rémillard’s book on Canadian federalism on the coffee table. “Well, you’re a professor with some good ideas in your book,” he said. “On my team, you would have an opportunity to implement them.” Rémillard was completely won over, though he was later given a reality check by Bourassa’s adviser, Jean-Claude Rivest. “Gil,” Rivest told Rémillard, “you know perfectly well that Robert hasn’t read your book.” Bourassa may have had a low-profile strategy for re-engaging on the constitutional issue, but there was no doubt that he wanted to get it done. In his address at the swearing-in of his government on December 12, 1985, he told the audience gathered in the Salon

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Rouge of the National Assembly that he hoped for a deal within two years. “Try to make a plan, but quietly,” he instructed Rémillard, adding: “It’s a priority.” As for his two-year timeline, Bourassa told him: “We have to achieve this while we’re still on the good side of the mountain.” Rémillard assembled a small team, including Roch Bolduc, head of the Quebec public service, who would later be named to the Senate by Mulroney; Diane Wilhelmy, the deputy minister of Intergovernmental Affairs; André Tremblay, an outside constitutional adviser; and Jean-Claude Rivest, in his role as Bourassa’s alter ego. Rémillard made a round of courtesy calls on his provincial counterparts, including Ian Scott in Ontario and Jim Horsman in Alberta. “We wanted to assess our reception,” he would recall, “and it was surprisingly positive.” He then “met the premier and reported back that there was a possible opening, that it wouldn’t be easy, but that there was an opening, and that we might be able to outline an action plan in a speech.” “You make the speech, not me,” Bourassa told Rémillard, giving him the go-ahead. “You do the tour of the provinces.” There was nothing new or revolutionary in Quebec’s five conditions, which Rémillard announced at Mont Gabriel. They had already been part of the Liberal platform, Maîtriser l’avenir, in the 1985 election. As Bourassa himself noted in Gouverner le Québec, “I had tried in 1986 to make proposals that would be difficult to refuse. Trudeau had already said, I believe in 1980, ‘the distinct society, in the sociological sense, can be envisaged.’ The Supreme Court, we had most of that at Victoria. The veto, too. The spending power was in Trudeau’s proposals in 1968 and 1969.” In fact, Trudeau, in an open letter to Le Devoir in December 1980, affirmed that Quebec was “le foyer principal du Canada français”— the principal home of French Canada. What was new, or at least refreshing, at Mont Gabriel, was the tone—it was conciliatory, and it was decidedly Canadian. “Quebec’s future is within Canada,” Rémillard said. “We believe in Canadian federalism because, within the federal system, Quebec can be faithful to its history and its unique identity while enjoying favorable conditions for its full economic, social and cultural development.” As a mission statement, it would do very nicely. It would also do as a vision—Bourassa’s vision of Quebec within Canada. Rémillard asked for recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within Canada, a veto in the constitutional amending formula, a limitation of the federal spending power, increased power over immigration, and

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a say in the appointment of the three Quebec judges on the nine-member Supreme Court. The last two points would be the easiest to negotiate. By custom, Quebec already had three seats on the Supreme Court, and the prime minister normally consulted the premier, as well as the provincial bar, before filling any vacancy in Quebec, as elsewhere in the country. As the legendary labor negotiator Alan B. Gold, appointed chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court by Mulroney, would say privately after the signing of the Meech Lake Accord, “In every labor agreement, there’s one clause that doesn’t cost either side anything. In this agreement, it’s the Supreme Court.” Equally, on immigration, Quebec was proposing only to constitutionalize the 1978 Cullen-Couture agreement between the Trudeau and Lévesque governments, which guaranteed Quebec a certain number of immigrants and increased its role in their integration. Even the long-standing issue of the veto was not all that troublesome. While Quebec proposed a new general amending formula of seven provinces and 75 percent of the population—rather than the “7/50” Vancouver formula adopted in 1982—Bourassa’s main objective was to recover a veto for Quebec, even if all the other provinces also enjoyed one. Indeed, they already did, as since 1982 unanimity was required to change the amending formula itself. However the issue was packaged, it was important for Bourassa to regain a veto for Quebec. He had walked away from the Victoria conference in 1971, leaving a veto on the table. Under the Victoria formula, any region with 25 percent of the population would have obtained a veto in perpetuity. As Bourassa later acknowledged to Rémillard, “It was an error not to have accepted that.” The distinct society and limits to the federal spending power would prove to be the most difficult points with opponents of any form of recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness within Canada and proponents of a centralist vision of federalism. “The distinct society was not the most important point substantively,” Rémillard said many years later. “But it was the most important point politically.” But he had subtly ratcheted up Quebec’s demand on the distinct society. In their 1985 platform, the Liberals had asked that recognition of a distinct society be included in the preamble to the Constitution. At Mont-Gabriel, Rémillard put it on the table as an interpretive clause of the Constitution, and critics would see that as a very different matter. Ironically, in view of what happened later, he had been somewhat influenced by the comments of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau on the distinct society in its earlier form in the Liberal program.

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“Trudeau said it was like china on the mantelpiece, strictly for show,” Rémillard recalled. “And we decided that if we’re going to sell that, we arrived at the conclusion it would have to be part of the Constitution, provided we could strike a balance between the two principles of the distinct society and the Canadian duality. It was a very sensitive issue.” The speech was an immediate sensation. “We were a bit surprised by the impact it had,” Rémillard said much later. At Mont Gabriel, he also stated the obvious. Quebec couldn’t achieve any of this agenda on its own. The other provinces and Ottawa would have to engage. In Ottawa, Brian Mulroney was doing exactly that with his appointment, in a cabinet shuffle on June 30, 1986, of Lowell Murray as his minister for Federal-Provincial Relations. And the arrival, later that summer, of the former B.C. premier’s deputy minister, Norman Spector, as Murray’s deputy was a further signal of a thaw in federalprovincial relations. Murray was an interesting choice. He was a famously reclusive figure, and his appointment was a signal that Mulroney intended to fly the issue below the radar. But it was also a signal to the provinces that a sympathetic minister was in charge of relations with the provinces—Murray had once been deputy minister to the premier in Richard Hatfield’s New Brunswick government. He knew the entire provincial mandarinate. “I wanted someone from the Senate,” Mulroney would say many years later, “because I wanted to conduct this with a degree of serenity, rather than being pounded on the issue in the House of Commons every day. In addition, Lowell had voted against patriation in the Senate because it was not supported by the National Assembly in Quebec, and that enhanced his credibility there.” Murray’s stature with the provinces was further enhanced by his membership on the Cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning, the inner cabinet. “Senator Murray’s role was very important,” Rémillard would say later. Early that summer, they had a private meeting at Rideau Gate, an official residence across the street from 24 Sussex in Ottawa, where Murray confirmed the federal strategy: “We’re there to work with you, but you take the lead.” “It was primarily an initiative of Quebec and the provinces,” he said years later, adding with his wry sense of humor: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” The next important event was the Premiers’ Conference in Edmonton in mid-August. At Murray’s recommendation, Mulroney decided to send the premiers a letter dated July 14, urging them to consider a Quebec round first. As it happened, it was Bourassa’s birthday, and the letter was a gift from the prime minister. “It seems to me that the only

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realistic way to proceed is to bring Quebec back into the fold,” Mulroney wrote, “and to undertake a more extensive revision of the Constitution at a later date.” But he also noted the risks of reopening this file: “The consequences of failure of these negotiations would be very serious for the future of Canada.” At Edmonton, Bourassa’s good relations with Getty and Peterson helped to move the constitutional dossier to the next stage. “Getty had an excellent relationship with Mr. Bourassa,” Rémillard observed. “Edmonton was very important. Getty, as chairman of the conference, had his own constitutional preoccupation—the Senate.” In Alberta, interest groups were already mounting a highly visible campaign for a Triple-E Senate—elected, effective, and equal. When Getty agreed to a Quebec round, it was an important and generous gesture, as well as a politically courageous one. “We had done a lot of work on that, “ David Peterson recalled, “but we kind of left it to the end of the meeting, and then everyone agreed.” And they agreed, as Mulroney’s former principal secretary, Bernard Roy, would observe fifteen years later, “because of their affection for Bourassa. They regarded him as the kind of guy they could do business with.” In the two-paragraph Edmonton Declaration, the premiers accepted Quebec’s five points “as a basis for discussion.” And Bourassa would say that they would “see what the chances are for reaching an agreement on the basis of Quebec’s proposals.” “I don’t think we’ll get a deal,” Brian Mulroney said privately, after inviting the premiers to a meeting at Meech Lake on April 30, 1987. He had called the meeting to assess the state of play and take the temperature of the people in the room. As he had noted in a Law Day speech in Ottawa on April 15, he had called the meeting “to take stock, and consider the next steps.” He added: “We must find out whether there is sufficient political will to bring Quebec in to justify the undertaking of formal negotiations or whether it would be better to close the books and wait for a more favorable moment.” But he had also been told in a briefing, as Spector would recall, “that a deal was conceivable and within reach.” Through the winter, Murray and Spector had toured the provinces, successfully flying below the media radar. Interest groups, always the first to lobby furiously on the Constitution, were uncharacteristically quiet and would be caught completely off guard by the outcome. Expectations for the First Ministers’ Meeting were remarkably low. “When Mr. Mulroney called the meeting, we were a bit surprised,” Rémillard would recall. “Our understanding was that the distinct society was still a major problem,

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and that the spending power was a problem, as well as the question of the veto.” Indeed, Ontario Attorney General Ian Scott had flown to Quebec City only four days before the Meech Lake meeting to advise Quebec that there was a problem with the distinct society. Ontario had polled the other provinces, he told Rémillard, and the distinct society wouldn’t pass. But Mulroney had also sent an unmistakable signal of his intent in his Law Day address. “Quebec, whose distinct society enriches the very nature of Canada,” he said, “must rejoin the constitutional family.” Then there was Mulroney’s choice of venue, Willson House at Meech Lake, in the Gatineau Hills of Quebec, just north of Ottawa. Normally used for cabinet retreats, Meech Lake was very much a sylvan Canadian setting. It was named for Asa Meech, an American clergyman who had settled there late in the eighteenth century. Willson House was a lakeside manse named for its builder, industrialist Thomas Willson, who owned a power station on Meech Lake. Adjacent to the prime minister’s summer residence at Harrington Lake, Meech Lake was only a twenty-minute drive from Ottawa, and when the federal government bought it in 1979, it spent $600,000 refurbishing Willson House. There was some suggestion at the time that it could be used as a Camp David–style retreat for the G7 summit of industrialized democracies in 1981. In the end, the summit venues were divided between Ottawa and Montebello. Meech Lake would wait another six years to achieve fame, or notoriety, as the site of a first ministers’ summit on the Constitution. Everyone in the room had an instant Canadian comfort level with the place on a clear, spring day, with a chill wind whipping down and whistling around the windows of the second-floor conference room. By day’s end, they would force a new spring. “I remember walking up the path to Willson House,” David Peterson would recall. “It was a cold, bright day. I remember thinking, ‘we can do this.’” He was not the only one. Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, who had been consulted by both Mulroney and Getty, was in Ottawa on business that day. “This is a doable deal,” he said that morning to a senior staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office. The interpersonal dynamic among the first ministers was enhanced by the set-up of the meeting. They gathered alone upstairs, while their ministers and officials were kept downstairs. “The minute you got into the room,” Spector would recall, “there was a sense around the table to get it done. There was a sense of problem-solving. It also helped that

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the bureaucrats were not present. These guys were discussing the big picture, the principles of an agreement.” It also helped, as Spector said, that the other premiers “genuinely regarded Bourassa as a nice guy, and as a partner. Everyone felt he was genuinely trying to solve a problem, and they were prepared to run risks in doing so.” There were, said Spector, twin dynamics driving the meeting: “One, everyone was looking for a deal. Two, there were Mulroney’s interpersonal and negotiating skills, which were among the finest I’ve ever seen.” The prime minister and premiers would have this discussion, and possibly come to a decision, among themselves, without the benefit of advisers. There were no note takers in the room and only two officials: Spector, on behalf of the federal government, and Oryssia Lennie, assistant deputy minister of Intergovernmental Affairs for Alberta, incumbent chair of the Premiers’ Conference, on behalf of the provinces. She would later be remembered as the only woman in the room. “It was only there, right at Meech Lake,” Mulroney recalled, “that the dynamic enabled us to do what we did.” Bourassa would later refer to the setting and the set-up as “la formule de Camp David,” after the presidential retreat where U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had negotiated the 1978 Middle East peace accords, without officials and away from the glare of the media. Mulroney began the meeting with an assurance that the premiers, as practicing politicians, could well appreciate. “Believe me,” he said, “I’m not doing this for the polls.” As he spoke, his approval rating had dipped below 20 percent, an all-time low. “I began,” Mulroney recalled, “by saying that for me this was an effort that had begun back at Laval in 1961.” As a law student, he had been an organizer of the Congrès des Affaires Canadiennes, which had famously framed the issue as “Canada: Failure or Success,” with keynote addresses from the likes of Jean Lesage, Davie Fulton, André Laurendeau, Gérard Pelletier, and René Lévesque. “To me, this was a continuum,” Mulroney observed many years later. “This was a discussion that had been taking place for decades, since Davie Fulton, since the Fulton-Favreau formula, since Lester Pearson made his opening to Quebec. I was sitting in the gallery of the Quebec legislature the day they adopted the opting-out formula for the Quebec Pension Plan.” “The aberration,” Mulroney later maintained, “took place in 1981, when amendments were made without Quebec, and when Trudeau accepted the notwithstanding clause.” Before going to Meech Lake, Mulroney had consulted two elder statesmen among the former premiers, Bill Davis of Ontario and Peter Lougheed of

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Alberta. “Lougheed and Davis both took the view,” he asserted, “that, of course, a final round was needed to bring in Quebec. That was their sense of it.” Mulroney wanted to ascertain if a consensus could be achieved around the table on Quebec’s proposals, and he suggested they discuss them one by one. “We did the easy stuff first,” said Spector, who had arrived with an accordion file folder containing several alternative drafts of each point. If one draft wasn’t acceptable, he would pass another one around the table. They began with the Supreme Court and immigration, the easiest points. Ottawa would agree to constitutionalize the Cullen-Couture agreement. On the Supreme Court, which would also entrench Quebec’s three members, there was an awkward moment when Bill Vander Zalm amiably suggested that if Quebec could have three seats on the high court, all provinces should. Mulroney called for a break, got Vander Zalm off to one side, and explained that a thirty-member Supreme Court was a non-starter, whereupon the premier of British Columbia withdrew his suggestion in the same genial spirit in which he had offered it. Then came the hard part—limitations to the federal spending power in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction, with an opting out-clause and compensation for dissenting provinces; the distinct society; and the veto. By the end of the afternoon, the first ministers had achieved agreement on the third of the five points—the spending power—as well as another one proposed by Mulroney: a role for the provinces in appointments to the Senate. Until full reform was achieved, appointments would be made from provincial lists acceptable to Ottawa. This was an incentive for the western provinces, particularly Alberta, to do a deal on the Quebec agenda. At one point, to be provocative, Mulroney even offered to abolish the Senate, for all the pleasure he took from appointing people to it. “You want to appoint people to the Senate?” he asked the premiers in a lighter moment. “Be my guest. Think of all the disappointed people you won’t be appointing.” On a more substantive level, Mulroney later said: “There is always this argument about whether Ottawa has too much power. That’s not the point. The prime minister’s power is overwhelming. I didn’t want to dilute Ottawa’s powers, but to dilute the pm’s power. I felt it was a healthy thing, to maintain the principle of consultation for the appointments to the Supreme Court and the Senate, as opposed to where the pm acts unilaterally. I saw our system as a functioning federation that would function better this way.” Along with a sense of momentum, there was also a sense among

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the premiers that they might be on the verge of making history. Then, at the end of the afternoon, the mood was dramatically broken and the momentum abruptly halted. Bourassa was handed a note that his finance minister, Gérard D. Lévesque, needed to speak to him urgently. His budget, due the following week, had been leaked to the 6 o’clock news on Montreal television station cfcf. “I have to take this call,” Bourassa explained to his colleagues. “I have a budget leak.” Everyone in the room understood the gravity of the event, and no one would have been surprised or offended if Bourassa had left. Nor would anyone have been surprised if the wily Bourassa had arranged the leak as a pretext for leaving. When he took the call in the next room, Lévesque promptly offered his resignation. “That’s out of the question,” Bourassa replied evenly, noting that the markets had closed and no damage would be done to the principle of budget confidentiality if Lévesque simply tabled his budget in the National Assembly that evening. The entire conversation lasted only a few minutes. With that, Bourassa returned to the room and explained the situation to his colleagues. In a sense, the budget leak proved to be fortuitous—Bourassa’s decision to remain in spite of it persuaded his colleagues that he was serious about reaching a deal. “That was a big moment,” Mulroney later agreed. While there was no discussion while Bourassa was out of the room, the conversation continued. “For me,” Mulroney told the premiers, “the issue isn’t ‘What does Quebec want?’ I’ve always found that offensive. The issue is ‘What does Quebec need?’ so it can sign honorably, and we can all put this behind us.” “I agree with that, Prime Minister,” said Peterson. But they still had to crunch the distinct society and the veto, and at that point Mulroney called for a supper break, which allowed the premiers to consult their ministers and officials downstairs. “This is the dangerous moment,” observed New Brunswick’s veteran premier Richard Hatfield, standing at the mid-landing of the staircase, looking down at the swarm of anxious officials gathered below. “Get these people out of here.” When the meeting resumed, Mulroney and Peterson spoke to the question of the distinct society, tied to a duality clause, which would entrench English-language minorities in Quebec and French-speaking Canadians elsewhere in the country as a “fundamental characteristic of Canada.” It was the packaging of the distinct society as part of a broader affirmation of Quebec and Canadian identity, rather than as a claim of special status, that made it acceptable to the other premiers. But some of them had a problem with the duality clause. Some premiers

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had pressed Murray on whether the entrenchment of francophone minority rights elsewhere in Canada, as well as for the Englishspeaking minority in Quebec, as a fundamental characteristic of Canada meant that they would have to do more for their Frenchspeaking minorities. A few minutes before 10 o’clock, somewhat to their own surprise and certainly to the great surprise of the country, they had a deal. Not a legal text, by any means, but an agreement in principle. “Brian was not at all aggressive about that,” Peterson would recall. “He made it clear that there would be time to improve it, to change it, that nothing was locked in. He handled it very well.” Afterwards, no one could remember any words of closing to the nine-hour meeting, or whether Mulroney had even said anything as mundane as “It’s a deal.” What everyone could clearly remember was a sense of elation in the room. Mulroney’s press secretary, Marc Lortie, excitedly called the Radio-Canada newsroom, where Bernard Derome was about to go on the air with Le Téléjournal. “There’s an agreement,” Lortie shouted into the phone, “a unanimous agreement on the Constitution at Meech Lake!” Reporters, who had been penned up all day in an adjacent building, were summoned to the second floor of Willson House to receive the stunning news. After going over his statement in a small third-floor office, Mulroney returned to the second floor to a spontaneous ovation from the premiers. “This has been a good day for Canada and a good day for Canadians,” he began. Standing behind him, with the other premiers, Bourassa couldn’t stop grinning. The Quebec spin machine immediately went into high gear, trumpeting the gains Bourassa had made to a highly skeptical Quebec press corps, which had been conditioned to failure in constitutional talks. “It’s a historic breakthrough,” he said, “for Quebec as a Canadian partner.” But there was a broader reality, as Mulroney explained privately that night: “What makes this a good deal is that it’s a low-cost deal, and that there’s something in it for everyone. Everyone goes home a winner.” As the Quebec press corps crowded around Bourassa, several of them held out the press release outlining the terms of the accord and asked him to autograph it. “My friends,” he told them, “you are holding a bit of history in your hands.” As he signed, he added with a characteristic chuckle: “Quebec premiers are usually the last to sign these things, not the first. I’m sure my colleagues will also add their signatures.” “That was one of the rare times I saw Robert Bourassa deeply moved,” Rémillard said long afterwards. “He had tears in his eyes.” So

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did more than one hardbitten member of the Quebec Press Gallery. Bourassa put his hand on Rémillard’s shoulder and said: “Gil, we’ve got it, now we’ve got to manage it.” That would prove to be a much bigger problem than anyone could have imagined.

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Bourassa wins the Liberal leadership for the second time on October 15, 1983. No one in Quebec or Canadian history who had lost a party leadership had ever re-gained it – until now. (The Gazette, John Mahoney)

The victor and the vanquished: three days after the Liberal sweep, Bourassa meets with outgoing Premier Pierre Marc Johnson to discuss the transfer of power. (The Gazette, Gordon Beck)

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Bourassa and David Peterson signing a bilateral environmental agreement in Montreal in 1988. “You can’t run the country without Ontario and Quebec, it’s that simple,” Peterson would say. (The Gazette, Pierre Obendrauf)

Such good friends. Prime Minister Mulroney and Premier Bourassa share a laugh at a rollout ceremony at Bombardier’s Canadair division in Montreal in May 1991. (The Gazette, Pierre Obendrauf)

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Miracle at Meech: April 30, 1987. Canada’s first ministers meet at Meech Lake. Bourassa and Mulroney are at the center of the talks. Left, Alberta’s Don Getty and pei’s Joe Ghiz chat with Manitoba’s Howard Pawley, while at right New Brunswick’s Richard Hatfield has a word with Newfoundland’s Brian Peckford. (Prime Minister’s Office)

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“In honor and enthusiasm.” Bourassa signs the Meech Lake Accord at the National Conference Centre, June 3, 1987. Justice Minister Ray Hynatshyn looks on as Norman Spector, secretary to the cabinet for Federal-Provincial Relations, walks the accord around the table. (The Gazette, Pierre Obendrauf)

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“The Queen’s Park-Ottawa-Quebec axis,” as David Peterson called it, shake hands at the 1987 signing of the Meech Lake Accord. The triangular alliance of the country’s three most powerful governments relied on strong interpersonal relations among the leadership trio that Peterson called “Brian, Robert, et moi.” (The Gazette, Pierre Obendrauf)

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September 25, 1989: Bourassa votes in the election that makes him Quebec’s first four-term premier since Maurice Duplessis. Andrée was his partner for thirty-eight years, and his closest friend. (The Gazette, Peter Martin)

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March 1991. Recuperating from cancer, Bourassa takes charge of a Liberal convention out of control because of the Allaire report recommending a quasi-sovereign Quebec. “Sovereignty? I could do it tomorrow,” he scoffed after Meech Lake. “I don’t believe in it.” (The Gazette, Peter Martin)

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With les boys: Bourassa liked a good workout with the media. Here he is mobbed on his return from Florida on January 11, 1993 – one year to the day before he would leave office. (The Gazette, Allen McInnis)

Hail and farewell: Robert and Andrée Bourassa leave the National Assembly after announcing his retirement as premier on September 14, 1993. Determined that her husband put his health and family ahead of politics, she is clearly delighted by the news. (The Gazette, Robert Galbraith)

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23 Deal at Dawn

The morning after the surprise agreement at Meech Lake, Brian Mulroney was in his third-floor office in the Centre Block, going over a statement he would deliver shortly in the House of Commons. His new chief of staff, Derek Burney, read the agreement for the first time as he was being driven to Parliament Hill from his office in the Langevin Block across the street. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” said Burney, skimming the Meech communiqué. A career diplomat and trade official, he had been brought into the Prime Minister’s Office to introduce management discipline and to oversee the free trade talks with the United States. Until that morning, he had not engaged in the constitutional file, which was being run out of the Federal-Provincial Relations Office, around the corner from the Langevin in the old Post Office building. It was Norman Spector’s file and, with his Mont Blanc fountain pen, standard equipment for a deputy minister, he stood nearby ready to make any last-minute changes to Mulroney’s statement. Before going down to the House, Mulroney placed a call to Lucien Bouchard, whom he had named ambassador to Paris. Bouchard was somewhere in French-speaking Africa that day, in his capacity as “sherpa” of the upcoming Quebec Summit of La Francophonie. “Félicitations, Brian,” said his friend of all the years since their law school days at Laval. Bouchard agreed that he would send over some lines for a full-scale parliamentary address on the accord, including this one: “Le rêve de millions de Québécois est en train de se réaliser.”—The dream of millions of Quebecers is becoming a reality. Mulroney’s caucus

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adviser, Tom Van Dusen, stuck his head through the door. An old parliamentary hand who had once worked for John Diefenbaker, he had seen it all in forty years on Parliament Hill. “Congratulations, Prime Minister,” he said. “It’s a remarkable achievement.” Mulroney passed around a handwritten note of fulsome congratulations from Eugene Forsey, the former senator and eminent constitutional authority. Only a few days later, Forsey would revise his views and denounce the Meech Lake Accord. Mulroney declined the advice of one senior adviser to release Forsey’s letter of congratulations. “It was a private communication,” the prime minister said. “I couldn’t do that to him.” “What about Trudeau?” someone asked Mulroney. “What about him?” Mulroney replied. Mulroney’s indifference to Trudeau was more feigned than real. Already, he had a sense that Trudeau’s support would clinch a national consensus, and that his opposition could spell trouble for the accord. And in this regard, Mulroney was not alone. Robert Bourassa was also curious about Trudeau’s response. The same day, Gil Rémillard spoke on the phone with the former prime minister at his office in Montreal. “Bourassa wanted Trudeau to be informed,” Rémillard said. “I had spoken with him on a few occasions before April 30 to put him in the picture on our position.” On May 1, they spoke again. “I’m very surprised,” Trudeau told Rémillard. “Congratulations. I haven’t seen the text yet. But I’ve got a problem with your distinct society clause.” Trudeau invited Rémillard to lunch a few days later at the Mount Royal Club in Montreal. As they sat in the dining room of the exclusive Sherbrooke Street venue, it was clear that Trudeau had read the text, and that he had strong reservations, which he shared with his guest. “He wasn’t enthusiastic,” Rémillard recalled. “He was very doubtful, especially on the distinct society, the spending power, and the Supreme Court. But I didn’t think he would come out the way he did.” In early May, Mulroney also placed to call to Trudeau, with an offer to send Spector and André Burelle down to Montreal to brief him at his office in the law firm of Heenan Blaikie. Burelle, by then a senior fpro official, had once been Trudeau’s speechwriter and was the author of his memorable interventions during the 1980 referendum. Mulroney recalled that after he was sworn in as prime minister in September 1984, Trudeau paid him a courtesy call. “He came to my office,” Mulroney said, “and said that I could count on his advice on issues like the Constitution.” Mulroney had extended the usual courtesies to his predecessor, and then some. As a gift to the former prime

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minister, he commissioned a portrait of Trudeau’s three sons by the prominent Atlantic Canadian artist Tom Forrestal, chosen by Trudeau himself. Trudeau hung the painting in his office and, said Mulroney, “wrote me a lovely letter.” When Trudeau joined Heenan Blaikie as counsel to the firm, Mulroney said, “I called him on his first day on the job to wish him well.” When Trudeau was named companion of the Order of Canada, said Mulroney, “I called him to offer a dinner for him at 24 Sussex, his guest list, and he called me back to decline with thanks, that he would be staying at the governor general’s, Madame Sauvé’s, and that she would be doing a dinner for him.” When Mulroney got back from China after an official visit in 1986, he “received a note from Trudeau thanking me for some kind things I had said about him there.” When Trudeau’s good friend Olof Palme was assassinated, Mulroney called and asked him to lead the Canadian delegation at the funeral of the Swedish prime minister. “It was against that background,” Mulroney said, that he called Trudeau and offered a briefing. “We’ve got a month or so in which we can modify this,” he told Trudeau. “I’d like to have the benefit of your counsel. I’m going to ask Norman Spector and André Burelle to brief you, and after you’ve had a chance to take a look at it, I’d like to have your views.” “I look forward to seeing them,” Trudeau said. “Let me hear from you,” Mulroney rang off. The briefing lasted three hours. Trudeau was courteous, but he made his reservations clear. As Spector and Burelle got up to leave, he mused that it was too bad it was always Ottawa that had to give something up to buy peace from the provinces. Trudeau never did get back to Mulroney with his comments. “The next we heard from him,” Mulroney said, “was the article.” On May 26, Mulroney and Trudeau, as well as David Peterson and John Turner, attended a black-tie dinner in Toronto hosted by Conrad Black in honor of Emmett Cardinal Carter on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination as a priest. At the head table reception, Mulroney exchanged pleasantries with Trudeau. “I saw him at the cardinal’s dinner,” Mulroney recalled. “He was off standing in a corner, and I went over and shook his hand and we had a chat.” Trudeau gave no indication of what was even then being typeset for the next day’s edition of The Toronto Star and La Presse. Mulroney, he had written, “has not quite succeeded in achieving sovereignty-association, but he has put Canada on the fast track for getting there . . . what a dark day for Canada was this April 30, 1987.” In a searing and sensational critique, Trudeau returned to his origins as a pamphleteer

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in Cité Libre. In his scathing and vitriolic denunciation of Meech, he declared: “It would be more difficult to imagine a more total bungle.” Mulroney, he wrote, was “a weakling” and, in French, “un pleutre,” which had connotations of a coward. The provincial premiers were “snivelers.” And Meech, if ratified, “will render the Canadian state totally impotent . . . governed by eunuchs.” It was the return of the intellectually contemptuous Trudeau, who had once scornfully dismissed Nobel laureate Lester Pearson as the “defrocked prince of peace” for accepting nuclear weapons on Canadian soil, only to turn around and join the Liberal party under Pearson’s leadership in 1965. If the tone was offensive, and even his closest friend, Gérard Pelletier, evidently worried that it was, Trudeau had adamantly refused the suggestion of La Presse editor Michel Roy that he tone down the personal stuff. “I meant them to be offended,” he said subsequently in an interview with Peter Gzowski on cbc Radio’s Morningside. “I think they are doing something basically wrong and I’m saying so in strong language.” Just so there was no mistaking his intent, Trudeau, in television interviews with cbc’s The Journal and Radio-Canada’s Le Point, repeated his accusation that Mulroney was a weakling. Among the offended first ministers, Mulroney was first among equals. “Look,” he recalled in 2001, “if he had called me, or even if at the cardinal’s dinner he had said, ‘I’ve got this article coming out tomorrow and I’m going to hit you pretty hard,’ that would have been fair ball. But he never said a word. He was wrong on the substance and on the essential courtesies of public office.” Nor was Bourassa spared Trudeau’s withering scorn. Trudeau did not fail to remind readers that Bourassa had left Victoria in 1971 with a veto for Quebec, only to renounce the constitutional agreement ten days later, partly on the advice of Claude Ryan that there weren’t sufficient guarantees of provincial prerogatives in social policy and health care. “The possibility exists, moreover, that in the end Mr. Bourassa, true to form, will wind up repudiating the Meech Lake accord, because Quebec will still not have gotten enough,” Trudeau wrote with evident contempt. “And that would inevitably clear the way for the real saviors: the separatists.” In his cbc Radio interview, Trudeau added that he had broken his silence because hardly anyone else was speaking up against Meech. “I was hoping,” he said, “that somebody, somewhere . . . would be sounding the alarm.” Years later, he would dismiss criticism of the ad hominem nature of his piece that it was “just politics.” With Trudeau himself sounding the alarm, even Mulroney acknowledged that he legitimized and galvanized opposition to Meech. As the

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father of patriation and the Charter of Rights, as a prime minister who had made the Constitution the great passion of his life, Trudeau had unique constitutional credentials. As a Quebecer denouncing Quebec’s gains in Meech, he made it intellectually respectable to oppose the accord in English-speaking Canada. Ontario’s former ndp premier Bob Rae would later write in From Protest to Power, his 1996 political memoir, “Trudeau made anti-French bigotry respectable, both over Meech and over Charlottetown. There is no greater irony in his political career.” It made no difference, then or later, that many of the grounds on which Trudeau denounced Meech were disingenuous and dishonest. Trudeau actually suggested the duality clause was a gain for “those who never wanted a bilingual Canada, Quebec separatists and western separatists,” who “get their wish right in the first paragraph of the accord, with recognition of ‘the existence of French-speaking Canada and English-speaking Canada.’” In fact, the duality clause recognized that “the existence of French-speaking Canadians, centred in Quebec but also present elsewhere in Canada, and English-speaking Canadians, concentrated outside Quebec but also present in Quebec, constitute a fundamental characteristic of Canada.” Far from the apocalyptic scenario suggested by Trudeau, the status of linguistic minorities would have been enhanced by their entrenchment as a fundamental characteristic of Canada in an interpretive clause of the Constitution. In an open letter to Quebecers on July 15, 1980, not two months after the referendum, Trudeau himself had written that he would ask the first ministers “to recognize still more explicitly the existence of two principal linguistic and cultural communities in the country, of which French has its home and centre of gravity in Quebec, while present throughout Canada.” There was no point denying this, he noted, adding it might as well be acknowledged “if we want to build a new Canada based on reality.” In his anti-Meech broadside, Trudeau also denounced the constitutionalization of the Cullen-Couture accord, an administrative arrangement negotiated and implemented by his own government. “We can guess what idea of Canada will be conveyed to immigrants in the various provinces,” he sneered, “with Canada undertaking to foot the bill for its own balkanization.” Trudeau went so far as to suggest that Mulroney was relinquishing the federal power of appointment to the Supreme Court and the Senate: “From now on, the Canadian government won’t be able to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court and Senate except people designated by the provinces.” In both instances, Mulroney had agreed to appointing judges and senators from lists submitted by the provinces, but acceptable to Ottawa.

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Mulroney later noted with heavy irony that Trudeau, in his 1978 constitutional white paper, had proposed essentially the same thing “with his House of the Provinces, where half the members of the Senate would be named by the provinces.” As for the Supreme Court, Trudeau’s apparent concern was that a separatist government in Quebec would submit only the names of separatist jurists or none at all, creating gridlock on the high court, even though it has been known to function with only seven judges out of nine. Trudeau even reproached Mulroney for not making gains for Ottawa, specifically the provinces not relinquishing the override, or “notwithstanding clause,” of the Constitution, a huge concession that he himself had made as the price of obtaining the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As Trudeau later acknowledged in testimony before the Senate, “there was a notwithstanding clause, which I also believed was bad, and which remained in the Charter.” Mulroney had a darker characterization of the constitutional override. “The notwithstanding clause,” he said, “is evil.” In a rejoinder published three days after Trudeau’s tirade in the weekend editions of The Globe and Mail and Le Devoir, Lowell Murray pointed out that there was little in the Meech Lake Accord that Trudeau had not offered himself, in one way or another, at one time or another, in every constitutional negotiation going back to Victoria in 1971. Trudeau would retort that he had never offered it all at once and had always asked for something in return. “Mr. Trudeau even agreed to recognize ‘the distinct character of Quebec society’ at the Constitutional Conference of September 1980,” Murray noted, though in fairness, Trudeau had only offered this in a preamble, rather than as an interpretive clause. Why, Murray asked, would Trudeau have a problem with the Cullen-Couture accord on immigration, “concluded by his own government in 1978?” Trudeau had offered to entrench Quebec’s three members of the Supreme Court as far back as Victoria, again in his 1978 constitutional project, and in 1980. In his 1978 white paper, A Time for Action, and later that year in his Constitution bill, C-60, Trudeau had indeed proposed a House of the Provinces in which half the members of the new upper house would be named by the provinces. As for the federal spending power in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction, Murray noted that Trudeau “himself recognized in the Constitution Act of 1982 the principle of fair compensation in opting out in education and other cultural domains.” In sum, Murray suggested, “Mr. Trudeau is like those generals who are nostalgic for war in a time of peace.” “I have, really, no disagreements on facts that he used in his letter,” Trudeau later stated in his

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testimony to the Senate, “and very few though perhaps major disagreements on opinions.” One week later, Le Devoir published another stinging rebuke of Trudeau, this time by Maurice Blain, a law professor at the Université de Montréal and a former member of the editorial board at Cité Libre. Under the headline, “Farewell to Lancelot,” Blain wrote that “Cité Libre probably wouldn’t have published this latest provocation.” None of the notable dissents from Trudeau’s piece had any apparent effect, and from the moment he entered the debate, he was able to frame the issues almost entirely on his own terms. As in the referendum campaign of 1980, Trudeau’s interventions in the Meech debate would be spaced and strategic. In August 1987, he appeared for more than three hours before a joint committee of the Commons and Senate, with Liberal members fawning over him and Conservatives notably reluctant to take him on. In March 1988, he appeared for nearly six hours on the floor of the Senate. Murray, the government leader in the Senate and minister responsible for the Meech file, chose discretion over valor and did not attend the session, much less confront Trudeau. “Even the Queen herself is forced to say the accord is a good thing,” Trudeau said as he began his 1988 Senate testimony, referring to a speech by the Queen in Quebec City in October 1987, on her first visit to Quebec in twenty-three years. This statement was completely false. The Queen had signed off on remarks written for her by the Prime Minister’s Office, but had decided on her own to go further in approving Meech in her address at a formal dinner at the Château Frontenac. She had been discussing the accord with Canadians as she crossed the country, she told Prime Minister Mulroney, and she had been impressed by the broad-based support for it. “I think we have to realize that Canada is not immortal,” Trudeau told the Senate Committee of the Whole, in what would become a sound bite for the ages, “but if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper.” Then in the final months of the Meech drama in the spring of 1990, Trudeau and his former principal secretary, Tom Axworthy, brought out a book that Axworthy had edited as part of the Trudeau legacy project. Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years ran to four hundred pages of essays by Trudeau’s colleagues, with only a few pages by the former prime minister. But it was Meech that became the focus of Trudeau’s three-day lightning book tour of Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. In the capital, over a hundred journalists turned up for his news conference. In Toronto, he appeared again on cbc’s The Journal, with Barbara Frum. With the appearance of Trudeau’s scathing polemic, any chance for

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a durable national consensus on the Constitution disappeared, and the debate would become increasingly polarized and bitter over the next three years. Within the family of the Liberal party, it became increasingly acrimonious over the next week, leading up to the June 2 First Ministers’ Conference at the Langevin Block, where they were supposed to sign off on a legal text. By the time Trudeau’s article appeared, the split in the federal Liberal ranks had become a schism. While the Trudeau wing of the party was in open revolt over Meech, the Chrétien faction was also constantly undermining the leadership of John Turner, who had endorsed the accord. Maclean’s headlined it “The great Liberal divide” and suggested that “the best outcome for party unity, some Liberals said privately, would be for the Meech Lake accord to collapse,” allowing that “their worst fear is that the party will be dangerously split along language lines during the next election.” While Turner’s leadership was under pressure on Parliament Hill, David Peterson was feeling the heat at Queen’s Park. He was leading a minority government and was moving towards an election in September. He was already feeling an anti-French backlash from Bill 8, his legislation to extend French-language rights and services in Ontario. His own attorney general and constitutional adviser, Ian Scott, was expressing grave reservations about the distinct society clause. And then, at the end of May, came the Trudeau article. “Trudeau’s article split the Liberal party in two,” Peterson ruefully observed many years later. “It tore the guts out of the party. There was Trudeau and people like Don Johnston on one side, and guys like Turner and me on the other.” Women and ethnic groups, core Liberal supporters in Ontario and Toronto, were also highly agitated by Trudeau’s article. “I had to exercise every bit of my popularity at the time,” Peterson said, to push back the stiffening resistance to the accord, even among his own circle of advisers. “Ian Scott was very aggressive. More of them were saying ‘don’t do it’ than ‘do it.’ I said, ‘We’re doing it, and here’s why.’” Meanwhile, in Ottawa, the Mulroney government was subjected to a full-court press from Bourassa’s constitutional team, which under Rémillard’s aggressive direction was pressing for every advantage in negotiating the legal text. “Quebec being Quebec,” Murray said dryly, “they tried to squeeze every last drop out of the accord.” Not only in private but in public, Bourassa and Rémillard would later overplay their constitutional hand in a futile attempt to buy the approval of the nationalists in Quebec. As Bourassa would tell the National Assembly on June 18, only five days before the Quebec legislature ratified the

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accord, “The entire Constitution, including the Charter, will be interpreted and applied in light of this section on the distinct society. The exercise of legislative authority is included, and we will thus be able to consolidate existing positions and make new gains.” Nothing of the sort was ever agreed to, either at Meech or at Langevin. Had Bourassa made such a statement before the Langevin meeting, it would certainly have ended in failure. And in saying so, he gave Trudeau a compelling piece of evidence for his case that Meech meant special status for Quebec. In the event, it very nearly failed, because of the pressure Peterson was under and the pressure Bourassa was bringing to bear. The Langevin meeting, which was supposed to have been a mere formality before a signing ceremony down the street at the National Conference Centre, instead became a nineteen-hour marathon wrangle, an allnighter that finally resulted in a deal at dawn. Room 414 North of the Langevin Block is a cheerless conference room, with narrow shafts of light filtered through fortress-style windows below the high ceiling. During the later Trudeau years, it had served as a cabinet room while the formal cabinet chamber in the Centre Block was undergoing renovation. The building has at least a distant constitutional connection, in the sense that it is named for a Father of Confederation, Hector Langevin, a Quebec journalist who would serve as Public Works minister in Sir John A. Macdonald’s cabinet, but was later forced to resign in disgrace over a patronage scandal. The Langevin is by no means one of the capital’s more splendid buildings, but it is perhaps the most important. The first two floors house the Prime Minister’s Office, the third and fourth floors the Privy Council Office. The two most powerful central agencies of the federal government are located under one roof, the real seat of power in the capital. The prime minister’s second-floor office was two floors directly below the conference room on the northwest corner of the building. The second-floor windows were tinted and bulletproof, and were usually covered by blinds to keep out the glaring afternoon sunlight, as well as any peering telephoto lenses. Mulroney rarely used the Langevin office, except when he wanted to hold a private meeting off his schedule, which was normally distributed to senior staff. But his Langevin office, and the building, would get a lot of use on June 2–3, 1987, the longest day in modern constitutional times. While the pm shuttled by a reserved elevator between the second and fourth floors, the invading provincial delegations simply took over Privy Council offices and conference rooms down the long fourth-floor

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corridor. And this time, the premiers came with a full complement of advisers—ministers, deputy ministers, outside legal counsel, constitutional scholars, chiefs of staff, directors of communications, press secretaries, and assorted spin doctors. Their job was to make sure their premiers knew what they were signing in a legal text, a very different creature from the agreement in principle that had been signed at Meech. Officials spent the entire month of May inserting commas, adding bracketed text, and, in one episode that would later prove worthy of Bill Clinton, arguing over the meaning of the word “the,” as in “the federal spending power,” and whether “the” connoted too much federal power. It was a Lawyers’ Ball. And on the eve of the Langevin meeting, Norman Spector acknowledged that difficult issues remained to be resolved by the first ministers. As before, only the eleven first ministers were in the room, on either side of the prime minister, in the order of precedence in which their provinces had joined Confederation, Ontario and Nova Scotia to the pm’s right, Quebec and New Brunswick to his left, and so on around the table to Newfoundland, the youngest Canadian province. But the mood was different from Meech Lake, where the participants were caught up in a sense of history, in the euphoria of the moment. The interest groups and constitutional lobby were jolted awake by the Meech surprise and had launched a month-long flurry of op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, aggrieved outbursts on talk radio, and phone calls to premiers’ offices across the land. The northern territories were ignored. There was nothing on native rights. Women’s groups and multicultural communities worried that the distinct society would take precedence over their hard-won gains in the Charter of Rights. In Quebec, the Péquistes predictably denounced Meech as a sellout. Then as later, Ottawa would seriously miscalculate by underestimating the degree to which, in just five years, Canadians had taken ownership of the Charter. But after the publication of Trudeau’s article, just six days before the meeting, the background noise of dissent became a fullthroated constitutional uproar. Peterson and Pawley were under the most pressure, from their Liberal and ndp constituencies, to press for changes to the accord. Peterson was hearing from the Charter Canadians, urged on by Trudeau. Pawley was getting it from activists on the left, who wanted to protect Ottawa’s power over social programs and entitlements—in other words, the federal spending power. And then there was Robert Bourassa, utterly unruffled, who would prove to be unyielding, day and night. He already had what he went

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there for. Why would he give any of it up? He came prepared. Mulroney hated hot rooms, and had the air conditioning running full blast. Through the entire nineteen-hour meeting, he never took off his jacket. Bourassa hated cold rooms. At one point, he opened his briefcase and took out a sweater. From morning to afternoon, into the evening, and through the night, until the dawn of the next day, the first ministers discussed essentially just two points, both of them deal-breakers, the distinct society and the federal spending power. There was no real discussion, or dispute, on the other points: the Supreme Court, the Senate, the amending formula, or immigration. And the entire discussion centered around three premiers, Peterson and Pawley, who wanted comfort on their issues, and Bourassa, who understandably refused to yield any of the gains he had won at the first meeting. But in a sense there was a twelfth person at the table, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, looming like a ghost at the banquet. “You could see the pressure building on Peterson,” Mulroney would later recall. “I felt badly for him. He was the one under the gun. He was not happy. He was under so much pressure. He had The Toronto Star and the Trudeauites on his back. What was difficult for David was Trudeau’s statement that all these premiers were weaklings who had made all these concessions to Quebec.” “There were issues of how to circumscribe the whole thing,” Peterson later explained. “I was negotiating to remove resistance.” He made it clear that Ontario needed clarification on the distinct society and the Charter. Bourassa made it clear that he had no intention of yielding. But at some point, he would have to move on the distinct society, allowing for a “non-derogation clause,” that it did not in any way diminish the powers of Parliament or the legislatures, as well as a new clause protecting multicultural and aboriginal rights. That was Peterson’s price. Bourassa would also have to accept the word “the,” as in “the federal spending power.” That was Pawley’s price. “I’m sorry, Robert,” Peterson said, when the meeting had reached an impasse over the distinct society and the Charter. “You’re not the problem, David,” Bourassa said softly. “It’s not you. It’s that bastard Trudeau.” Nearly fifteen years later, Mulroney could vividly recall the moment: “I remember that because Robert never used profanity.” Sometime after midnight, Mulroney called a break and went downstairs to his office, where he sat alone with a glum look on his face. “There ain’t gonna be no deal,” he said. “What’s the problem?” I asked. “It’s our friend, Robert,” Mulroney said. “He won’t give an inch.”

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I left the pm’s office and went looking for Jean-Claude Rivest, Bourassa’s alter ego, in the fourth-floor corridor, and took him aside near the central staircase of the Langevin. “This deal will never come back,” I told Rivest. “It will never come back. If you’re going to move, now’s the time. The prime minister is about to call it off.” Rivest took the message back to his premier in the Quebec delegation room. By now, Ontario and Manitoba had an understanding that they would either stay at the table or walk together, so that no one province could be blamed for killing the accord. Peterson, his white shirt sleeves rumpled and his trademark Liberal red tie open at the neck, was visibly perturbed as he returned to Room 414 following one of the breaks after midnight. “We’ve given so damn much,” he said angrily, pushing his way past federal officials into the conference room. Behind him, his attorney general, Ian Scott, engaged Frank Iacobucci, the federal deputy minister of justice, in an unseemly shouting match in which they very nearly came to blows. Iacobucci and Roger Tassé, Ottawa’s outside constitutional adviser, had been summoned to the conference room, along with four Ontario officials, including Scott, who made an argument that the distinct society would jeopardize minority language rights. Bourassa had been hearing all day and into the night about Ontario’s concerns on the distinct society and the Charter. Now he called Peterson on it, and suggested he bring his experts into the room. “Is Mr. Scott in there?” Quebec’s deputy minister, Diane Wilhelmy, asked a federal official with definite edge in her voice. “Yes.” “Then Mr. Rémillard should be, too.” Iacobucci and Tassé disagreed with Scott, as did Peter Hogg, Ontario’s own constitutional adviser. Iacobucci had been dean of law at the University of Toronto, and Mulroney would later name him to the Supreme Court. Tassé’s opinion carried particular weight, because he had been deputy minister of justice to Jean Chrétien during the 1981–82 round over patriation and the Charter. In a very real sense, he was the author of the Charter. As Mulroney later recalled Tassé telling him, “You know, Prime Minister, I wrote the Charter. Trudeau and Scott are wrong. Nothing here dilutes minority rights.” During one break in the middle of the night, Mulroney summoned Iacobucci and Tassé into his office. “Peterson is still concerned about the distinct society impacting minority language rights,” Mulroney said. “Does it?” “No, Prime Minister,” said Tassé. “No, sir,” said Iacobucci.

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“Then,” Mulroney said, “I want you to come back into the meeting and tell them what you just told me, in just those words.” In fact, the duality clause, affirming the English-language minority in Quebec and the French-language minority elsewhere in Canada, was joined to the distinct society clause, which would have to be interpreted in light of it. D’Iberville Fortier, then Ottawa’s commissioner of official languages, said at the time that the duality clause represented “a net gain” for both anglophones in Quebec and francophones in the rest of Canada. As for the distinct society, Mulroney would often quote Brian Dickson, chief justice of the Supreme Court at the time of Meech, from a 1996 speech: “Let me say quite directly that I have no difficulty with the concept,” Dickson observed. “In fact, the courts are already interpreting the Charter of Rights and the Constitution in a manner that takes into account Quebec’s distinctive role in protecting and promoting its Francophone character. As a practical matter, therefore, entrenching formal recognition of Quebec’s distinctive character in the Constitution would not involve a significant departure from the existing practice in our court.” But at the Langevin lock-up, even the addition of the non-derogation clause and the added protection for multicultural and aboriginal communities, as well as the learned assurances on minority language rights, were not enough for Peterson. Scott argued that Quebec might use the distinct society as a pretext for moving in on financial services and international trade. Finally, Peterson wanted an additional clause clearly affirming the supremacy of the Charter. At last it became too much for Bourassa, who at one point, as Andrew Cohen wrote in his definitive account, A Deal Undone, “stood up, brought down his hand on a copy of the accord, and declared: ‘It will be Meech Lake, nothing more, nothing less.’” Mulroney called for another break. As he later wrote in an article for Maclean’s: “People were getting pretty tired, but by then I made it quite clear that we were going to go until we either got an agreement or we didn’t.” At 3:45 in the morning, he summoned federal officials to his office. He told them he was going to call a vote. “In the meantime,” he said, “we better get ready to shut this thing down.” During the several breaks after midnight, the Ontario and Manitoba delegations would caucus in the fourth-floor corridor, wondering whether to hold or fold. During the final break, Pawley phoned federal ndp leader Ed Broadbent, a strong supporter of Meech, who had proposed the formulation of “the” federal spending power, a suggestion Mulroney had taken on board. “Howard,” Broadbent told him

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bluntly, “take the goddam deal.” In that sense, as New Brunswick’s Richard Hatfield said during the final break, “We are down to one word, the word ‘the.’” It was enough for Broadbent and, finally, for Pawley. As Mulroney called a vote at 4:45 in the morning, a new day was breaking over Parliament Hill. In canvassing the premiers, he would normally have looked to his right, and begun with Peterson. Instead, he looked to his left and began with Bourassa, who gave his assent to the amended accord. And so it went around the table to Pawley, the eighth premier to be polled. Pawley characteristically hemmed and hawed, stressed his reservations, talked about hearings back in Manitoba, insisted he wasn’t signing a blank check, and might well want to come back to the table. But in the end, he said, “I’m with you, Prime Minister.” The ninth premier, Nova Scotia’s John Buchanan, had been on board from the beginning. Finally, Mulroney looked directly at Peterson, sitting next to him. “Well, David,” Mulroney asked quietly, “do we have a deal?” Peterson, isolated, knew he was the deal-maker or deal-breaker, and that, in the event of failure, he would be perceived as abandoning Quebec and his friend Bourassa, and destroying the very alliance between the two provinces that was a central purpose of his premiership. “I’m in, Prime Minister,” Peterson finally replied. This time, there was no cheering, no applause, no sense of history, only a sense of exhaustion. “Why all the long faces?” Norman Spector said brightly as he stuck his head out the door. “We’ve got ourselves a deal.” For nearly twenty hours, Bourassa had held fast, and held on to most of the gains he had achieved in the first meeting at Meech Lake. But Peterson had also won, in the non-derogation clause, the aboriginal and multicultural protections, and the affirmation of “the” federal spending power, an important point in Ontario, the most centralist of all the provinces. At 6 o’clock in the morning, Mulroney came out of the east door of the Langevin and announced the beginning of a new day for Canada. In six hours, the first ministers would reconvene at the Conference Centre for the signing ceremony. A few minutes before noon, Mulroney was sitting with his feet up on the desk of his office in the Conference Centre, a few steps away from the cavernous old hall that had been the site of so many federal-provincial conferences on the Constitution, all of which ended in failure, except for the November 5, 1981 accord on patriation and the Charter, which went ahead without the signature of Quebec. Meech had been about obtaining that very signature, and Mulroney, knowing he was on the threshold of history, was in an expansive mood.

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But just minutes before the signing ceremony was scheduled to begin, Norman Spector burst into the room. “There’s a problem with Quebec,” Spector said urgently. “What?” Mulroney replied, as he sat bolt upright in his chair. “The contretemps was over the inclusion of a reference to the equality of the provinces in the preamble,” Spector would later recall. “It was a last-minute agreement at the political table. Diane Wilhelmy balked when she saw it. Bourassa figured it was not worth a fight.” So the last-minute crisis was averted and the nationally televised signing ceremony went ahead as scheduled at 12:15 p.m., with Spector walking the accord around the table for the signature of the eleven first ministers. He began with Mulroney and then placed the Meech Lake Accord in front of Bourassa, who signed it with a flourish and said, “There.” At that moment the Conference Centre, known for perfunctory applause and bad acoustics, exploded in a standing ovation for Bourassa. It lasted well over a minute, and the premier blinked back tears. “Mr. Premier,” Mulroney said, as he turned to Bourassa in concluding his remarks, “I hope it can be said that you have signed with honor and enthusiasm, and that the National Assembly will soon do the same.” Normally, Peterson would have spoken next, but he deferred to Bourassa. “My dear fellow citizens,” Bourassa concluded in English. “As of today, there is a more solid national unity in this country. Canada is one of the greatest countries of the world because of its political identity and because of its original characteristics. One of the most original characteristics of this country is the participation of Quebec as a major partner.” He added: “It is with great pride as a Quebecer and as a Canadian that I am here today to express my deep satisfaction with the reintegration of Quebec within the Canadian Constitution.” Never had Bourassa, or any Quebec premier of modern times, spoken of such attachment to Canada. It was a measure of how remarkable, and ultimately how fleeting, was this moment in the life of the country.

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24 Such Good Friends

On September 1, 1987, Brian Mulroney was walking across the grounds of the National Assembly, accompanied by two classmates from Laval law school—Bernard Roy, his principal secretary, and Lucien Bouchard, his sherpa for the second Sommet de la Francophonie, due to begin the next day in Quebec City. They were meeting Robert Bourassa for lunch at the Garrison Club, the preferred table of the Quebec City establishment. The summit was being organized and chaired by Canada and hosted by Quebec. The heads of forty-nine governments of the French-speaking world, including the president and prime minister of France, would gather under a huge painting of the Sovereign Council of colonial New France in the Salon Rouge of the National Assembly. As Mulroney walked down the Grande Allée, Bourassa was driving up from the Château Frontenac, where he now stayed in Quebec. He hopped out of his car in front of the Garrison Club, waved to Mulroney, and they went in together. It wasn’t every day that the prime minister of Canada bumped into the premier of Quebec on the street in Quebec City. But then, it wasn’t an everyday relationship. Relationships between Canadian prime ministers and Quebec premiers generally range from transactional to confrontational. Pierre Trudeau never bothered to conceal his contempt for Bourassa, whom he regarded as vacillating and weak. Trudeau and René Lévesque got along, as Lévesque said of Canada and Quebec, “like two scorpions in a bottle.” Jean Chrétien never had time to establish a working relationship with Jacques Parizeau, who had a fast-track agenda for sov-

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ereignty, and who in any event had patronized him when they had been finance ministers in the Trudeau and Lévesque governments. Chrétien and Lucien Bouchard would establish a functional working relationship on Quebec files. Bouchard even went along on Team Canada trade missions abroad in the late 1990s. But Mulroney and Bourassa had the closest working relationship of any Canadian prime minister and Quebec premier since Lester Pearson and Jean Lesage in the mid-1960s. Pearson and Lesage had been colleagues in Louis St. Laurent’s cabinet in the 1950s, and Pearson’s vision of cooperative federalism played a significant role in Lesage’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Quebec’s opting out of the Canada Pension Plan, to create its own Quebec Pension Plan as the foundation for the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, was a primary example of federal-provincial cooperation that allowed Quebec to develop as a modern state within Canada. Mulroney and Bourassa were destined to do big things together, from the Meech Lake Accord, to the Free Trade Agreement, to La Francophonie. Bourassa even supported the unpopular goods and services tax, bringing in his own Quebec sales tax on top of the gst. They met often, to a degree the press was never aware of. “I used to see Robert privately,” Mulroney recalled. “I would come to Montreal on a Sunday night, for dinner at his house or at his office at HydroQuébec. Or he would come to Harrington Lake to see me. And we really had the opportunity to talk things through.” “In politics, friendship is something that has to be looked at philosophically,” Bourassa would observe in a 1995 lecture for Gouverner le Québec. “You can have very friendly and very personal relations, as I had with Mr. Mulroney. But as a general rule, it’s the old principle of realpolitik that applies here. Politics is above all an alignment of forces. So, personal relations can improve the climate and mutual understanding. But at bottom, it’s the people’s interest that is by far the determining factor.” In the case of Mulroney and Bourassa, it was not only personal preference but also their common view on the determining issues of public policy that reinforced their political alliance. And in his more cynical moments, Bourassa had occasionally quoted Thomas Jefferson to the effect that there were no friends in politics, only allies. The Mulroney-Bourassa alliance was even mutually beneficial in the appointment process. When Herbert Marx resigned as Quebec justice minister over Bourassa’s invoking of the notwithstanding clause in Bill 178, the premier asked the prime minister to name him to the bench, and Mulroney happily appointed him to the Quebec Superior Court. When Roch Bolduc left the Quebec government as head of the public

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service, Mulroney named him to the Senate at Bourassa’s request. When Mulroney would be accused of spending too much on pork in his riding of Manicouagan and, later, Charlevoix, Bourassa could always be counted on to find some public works money for the North Shore of Quebec. When Bourassa’s 1989 re-election campaign went off message for a week because of an orphan shipload of toxic wastes that had been turned back in England, Mulroney quickly arranged for the pcbs, dubbed “the Ship of Death” in the media, to be unloaded and stored at Baie-Comeau. When there was a tough call to be made, about whether to award the CF-18 maintenance contract to Canadair of Montreal or Bristol Aviation of Winnipeg, Mulroney awarded the $1.4 billion contract to Quebec in October 1986. Contrary to the general understanding, he later maintained he had never been contacted personally by Bourassa on the Canadair contract, though Bourassa’s office clearly tracked the file closely at the pmo. “The one person who did call me was Laurent Beaudoin,” Mulroney later said of Bombardier’s chairman. “He made the case to me of why Canadair had to have it, not so much for the value of the contract but for the technology transfers.” Mulroney’s sense of major government procurement was to create critical mass in key industries by region, rather than cutting contracts up on a regional basis. Thus, the Saint John shipyard in New Brunswick was awarded the entire $6 billion Canadian navy frigate program, to the disappointment of shipyards such as Davie in Quebec. And Montreal, already growing in aerospace, was a logical choice for the CF-18 contract, to the dismay of Winnipeg. The decision caused a firestorm of protest in the west, and did not really do much for the Conservatives in Quebec, but it was a major victory for Bourassa, in both the symbolic and the substantive importance of winning a major contract for Quebec’s aerospace industry. The CF-18 award involved much more than money; it meant important technology transfers to Canadair at a time when it had just been privatized, in a sale that essentially created Bombardier’s aerospace division. At the time, Canadair was producing Challenger executive jets, and a stretch version, the fifty-seat Regional Jet, would soon be in the pipeline. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Bombardier would be an $18 billion-a-year company and the pride of Quebec in the new economy, led by its $10 billion-a-year aerospace unit, based in Montreal. Similarly, when Mulroney was faced with a choice between Ottawa and Montreal for the Canadian Space Agency in 1991, he selected Saint-Hubert on the South Shore of Montreal. Ottawa had lobbied vigorously on the grounds that it was the natural home for a national

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agency and had a well developed high-tech infrastructure, not to mention its predominantly anglophone demographics in an industry that was overwhelmingly English-speaking. The Montreal bid had two things going for it—critical mass in the aerospace industry, with Bombardier, cae, Pratt and Whitney, and others that by the dawn of the twenty-first century would make the Montreal region the world’s second largest center of aerospace, second only to Seattle. It also had Robert Bourassa, making the case for Montreal. The Mulroney-Bourassa electoral coalition also worked to their mutual advantage. In the 1984 federal campaign, Mulroney positioned himself with voters as Trudeau’s heir as Quebec’s favorite son. Still, the Tories historically had no extensive or established ground game of their own in Quebec, and the Quebec Liberals provided one in several dozen ridings. Bourassa’s chief organizer, Pierre Bibeau, was openly advising Mulroney’s top Quebec lieutenant, Bernard Roy. Friendship aside, it was in Bourassa’s own electoral interest to have the Conservatives in power in Ottawa, especially in a government led by a Quebecer who had an instinctive appreciation of all the Quebec issues and files. Moreover, Mulroney represented the first wave of change in 1984, as Bourassa represented the next wave in 1985. Most of all, with the Liberals out of office in Ottawa, Bourassa was not susceptible to the old pq mantra that the Quebec Liberals were merely a branch office, a succursale, of the federal party. When Mulroney vetoed the formation of a Quebec Conservative party at a joint news conference with Bourassa, the 1985 Quebec election was sealed as a two-party race, without another federalist option to bleed support from the Liberals. And when Lucien Bouchard ran as a Conservative candidate in the Lac-Saint-Jean by-election in June 1988, it was with the clear support of Bourassa and the grosse machine rouge. “I can’t say he’s the strongest federalist I’ve ever seen,” Bourassa said with a touch of irony. By the time Mulroney and Bourassa took office in the mid-1980s, they had been close friends for more than a decade. Mulroney owed his early prominence to Bourassa for appointing him as one of the three Cliche commissioners in 1974. Bourassa did not want it said that he was seeking a whitewash, so there wasn’t a single Liberal appointed to the inquiry into violence and corruption in the Quebec construction industry. The chairman, Judge Robert Cliche of the Quebec provincial court, had been the ndp’s Quebec leader and had once merrily referred to Pierre Trudeau as “Quebec’s revenge on Canada.” Guy Chevrette, representing the trade unions, was a Péquiste stalwart who would later serve in every pq government under five premiers, from René Lévesque to Bernard Landry.

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And there was Brian Mulroney, a Conservative activist, as the representative of management. He had a reputation as a labor lawyer and mediator who could settle difficult strikes, particularly at La Presse and on the Montreal waterfront. But the Cliche Commission made him a celebrity in Quebec and gave him a national platform. Without the profile created by the Cliche Commission, Mulroney would never have run for the Tory leadership in 1976, and without the lessons he learned from his first leadership campaign, he would never have been prepared for the second race in 1983. On the Cliche inquiry, he essentially protected Bourassa with the commission staff. The commission counsel, an obscure Chicoutimi lawyer named Lucien Bouchard, wanted to subpoena Bourassa to appear in the witness box as his final witness, following Justice Minister Jérôme Choquette. As reported in Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister, my 1984 biography, “The question of whether the premier of Quebec could, or should, be summoned before the Cliche inquiry had precipitated a major crisis within the commission. In an argument that went on for several evenings, Mulroney made it perfectly clear to his colleagues that if they insisted on issuing a subpoena to the premier, that he, Mulroney, would quit. This set him on a collision course with his close friend Bouchard, by now the commission’s chief counsel. ‘My plan was to put Bourassa in the box,’ Bouchard acknowledged. ‘It was the logical follow-up to Choquette.’” On both philosophical and political grounds, Mulroney was having none of it. He thought it inappropriate to put the elected head of the government in a star-chamber setting before an inquiry that Bourassa had himself appointed. And for the sake of appearances, he thought the premier deserved better than to be compared with a union reign of terror. “I just said absolutely, no,” Mulroney recalled “That it was an excess of the jurisdiction of the commission, and that I had no intention of going along with the request under any circumstances.” At the end of the day, Cliche sided with Mulroney against Chevrette, and by a 2 to 1 margin, Bourassa avoided an embarrassing appearance that would have been part of the permanent film archive of his career. When it came time to write the royal commission’s report in the spring of 1975, Mulroney served as the back channel between the inquiry and the premier. It was no accident that all its main recommendations, including a new construction industry commission and slapping four unions into trusteeship, were acceptable to and quickly implemented by the Bourassa government. They had all been cleared with the premier by Mulroney. As John Sawatsky concluded in Mul-

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roney: The Politics of Ambition, “The report criticized the government hard enough to be credible, and to make an impact, but not so hard that Bourassa would reject it. Mulroney had brokered the deal in his classic style.” After the Cliche Commission, both Mulroney and Bourassa had every reason to be grateful to each other, Mulroney for the prominence he achieved and Bourassa for the embarrassment he averted. The commission became the foundation, not only for their friendship, but also for their unique political partnership during the eight years, from 1985 to 1993, that they were in office together. The senior advisers in the pmo and the premier’s office, known as the Bunker, took their principals as their role models and managed a close relationship. Bernard Roy was constantly on the phone with Mario Bertrand, Bourassa’s chief of staff, known as “l’abrasif.” Later, chiefs of staff Stanley Hartt, Norman Spector, and Hugh Segal in Mulroney’s pmo were in close touch with John Parisella in Bourassa’s office, particularly during the Oka Crisis of 1990 and the reconstruction of the constitutional file leading to the Charlottetown Accord of 1992. Even when the interests of Ottawa and Quebec differed or diverged, as they often did, one Cabinet du Premier Ministre would usually give a heads-up to the other. While Mulroney brought Bernard Roy and Lucien Bouchard along for lunch at the Garrison Club, Bourassa was accompanied by Mario Bertrand and Jean-Claude Rivest, his closest political adviser. “It was a great lunch,” Rivest chuckled when they emerged two hours later. “The feds paid.” He was standing in the lounge of the Garrison Club, while Bourassa and Mulroney moved through the open French doors to a splendid walled garden, where dozens of reporters were waiting for them. “We are,” Bourassa said, “experiencing an unprecedented moment of national unity.” It was an extraordinary comment and, indeed, an extraordinary moment in the history of relations between Ottawa and Quebec. There was, for one thing, the afterglow of Meech, which the National Assembly had been the first legislature to enact, just before the summer recess on June 23. Such was the euphoric environment after Meech that Mulroney was able to schedule a visit by the Queen to Quebec City at the end of October, her first to Quebec in twenty-three years. The last time she had visited the provincial capital in 1964, it was remembered as “La Nuit de la Matraque,” and a violent clash between police swinging truncheons and separatists shouting slogans. In October 1987, the Queen visited the Quebec City and the Lower St. Lawrence region for

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two days without incident. Though the crowds were small, she was warmly received, and at Bourassa’s invitation, she spoke in her excellent French at a luncheon at the National Assembly. Then there was the second Sommet de la Francophonie, where Canada and Quebec would play a leading role in creating the institutions of the French-language commonwealth, notably TV5, the global French-language television network that would send made-in-Quebec programming around the world. At the Quebec Summit, Mulroney also pressed for human rights and democratic development as the quid pro quo of Canada forgiving $325 million in Third World debt. The Quebec Summit was Bouchard’s first big role on the Quebec and Canadian stage. As Mulroney’s ambassador to France from 1985, he had brokered the peace between Ottawa and Quebec and obtained the agreement of Paris for a formula that would allow Quebec and New Brunswick to participate in areas of their exclusive or shared jurisdiction, such as education and culture, while reserving Canada’s exclusive role over areas such as the global economy and foreign affairs. It had been more than a century since the term “francophonie” had been coined in 1880 by the French geographer Onesime Reclus to describe the community of the French-speaking world. For years, the creation of La Francophonie had been thwarted by a sterile quarrel among Ottawa, Quebec, and Paris. Bouchard broke this iron triangle in his first two months on the job. And as the sherpa of the Quebec Summit, he emerged as a star in his daily briefings for the Quebec, Canadian, and international media. The fact that Ottawa and Quebec were close partners at the Quebec Summit did not prevent Bourassa from maneuvering for every advantage for Quebec at the table. When he intervened at a closed session on the international economy, President Haj Omar Bongo of Gabon said that he agreed “with the proposal of Mr. Bourassa.” Mulroney, a cold fury in his voice, interrupted from the chair. “Mr. Bourassa did not make a proposal,” he said icily. “He made a suggestion,” clarifying that it was outside the agreement circumscribing Quebec’s role at the summit. Then Mulroney pulled Bourassa aside and walked him down the corridor behind the Salon Rouge, pointing out that such interventions were “very bad for Canada.” Bourassa nodded his agreement, and his comments were never made public. For the rest, the Quebec Summit proceeded without incident between Canada and Quebec, and produced a flurry of cultural and economic agreements that established La Francophonie on a par with the Commonwealth among the world’s foremost multinational families. Early in January 1988, some of Mulroney’s campaign advisers were sitting around the prime minister’s second-floor boardroom in the

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Langevin Block, discussing how to sell the Free Trade Agreement in the pre-writ period leading up the federal election expected that fall. “Do you think?” asked Harry Near, an Ottawa consultant who would run Mulroney’s campaign tour, “that we could get Bourassa to introduce the prime minister at a lunch in Montreal?” Bernard Roy, Mulroney’s close friend and principal secretary, picked up the phone, and soon Premier Bourassa was on the line. “Damn good idea,” he immediately agreed. And so another symbolic gesture would be made in the annals of federal-provincial relations—the premier of Quebec would introduce the prime minister of Canada, in exceptionally warm and generous words, endorsing a national public policy initiative in the strongest terms. On January 29, speaking at a packed luncheon of a thousand business people at the Chambre de Commerce de Montréal, Bourassa walked through all the reasons for Quebecers to support free trade, and he even offered to go across the country selling it. He then singled out the fta, Meech Lake, and La Francophonie as producing “concrete results that are so important to Quebec,” calling Mulroney a leader of who had governed Canada with “courage, determination and lucidity.” Bourassa concluded his introduction by presenting the prime minister as “le grand artisan de l’unité nationale.” Sitting at a table near the podium, Pierre Pettigrew, former executive assistant to Claude Ryan and future International Trade minister in the Chrétien government, made a low whistling sound. “That’s going far,” he said, especially for someone like Bourassa, who chose his words carefully. There was more: Mulroney and Bourassa taped a joint appearance with the popular talk-show host Pierre Pascau. Then they had a formal bilateral meeting upstairs at the luncheon hotel site. It was more than an introduction—it was a laying on of hands by Bourassa for the coming election campaign, at a time when Mulroney’s Conservatives were still trailing Turner’s Liberals in the opinion polls, in Quebec as across Canada. The Gazette described the introduction as “a slap in the face to federal Liberals,” who were “already angry that Bourassa had agreed to introduce the prime minister at the lunch.” Raymond Garneau, his own former finance minister and now Quebec lieutenant of the Turner Liberals in Ottawa, complained that Bourassa was too friendly with Mulroney and that he should be “less chummy.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the cousins freaked out. The federal Liberals were now sorely divided on two issues—Meech Lake—opposed by Trudeau, and free trade—opposed by Turner. Both were strongly supported by Bourassa and the Quebec Liberals. There can be no doubt – free trade would never have got done without Bourassa’s support throughout the negotiations and Quebec’s

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strong endorsement in the election of November 21, 1988, which was transformed into a plebiscite on the issue. Long before, during the negotiating stage, Bourassa had been a key supporter of the fta. Mulroney called several First Ministers’ Meetings, usually to brief the premiers on the progress of the talks. He also established the Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade (sagits) as a consultative channel for industry, which also provided input for Bourassa through the business community on important segments of the Quebec economy. “The sagits reinforced the first ministers,” recalled Charles McMillan, then Mulroney’s senior policy adviser. “They were where the rubber hit the road on the segments of the economy.” From the beginning of the free trade talks in June 1986 to their conclusion in October 1987, Bourassa was on board. So was Alberta’s Don Getty. The alliance of Quebec and Alberta was the heart of the Mulroney political coalition, and would be critical to his prospects of winning the next election. On the evening of Saturday, October 3, 1987, Mulroney and a handful of senior federal ministers were closeted in the familiar fourth-floor boardroom, Room 414 North, of the Langevin Block, while in Washington the Canadian negotiating team made one last effort to clinch a free trade deal with the Americans before President Ronald Reagan’s “fast track” authority, to negotiate an agreement for an up-or-down vote without amendment by the Congress, expired at midnight. But when it came to Canada’s bottom line, the Americans would not move on the grounds that dispute settlement tribunals would diminish the sovereign authority of the Congress and the U.S. government. It was a deal-breaker. “This thing isn’t going to go,” Mulroney said, as he waited for a call to be placed from the bank of phone booths outside the conference room. Around 9:30 that Saturday night, Mulroney spoke with U.S. Treasury Secretary James A. Baker, who had taken over the free trade file for the White House. “You know, Mr. Prime Minister,” Baker said, “I don’t think we can get you this.” “I’m telling you what I’m going to tell President Reagan,” Mulroney told Baker. “You’ll have to explain why you could make an arms treaty with your worst enemies, the Russians, but not a trade treaty with your best friends, the Canadians.” “pm,” Baker replied, “can you give me half an hour?” Over the next two hours, an agreement was reached on the dispute settlement panels, and with only half an hour to the fast-track deadline, Baker burst into the Canadian delegation room, in his own Treasury office suite, announcing a police escort for a messenger carrying a letter from the president of the United States to the clerks of the House

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of Representatives and the Senate, stating that an agreement had been reached between Canada and the United States within the fast-track deadline. Finally, Mulroney himself got on the phone with Burney, and came to his bottom line. “Is this whole thing better than what we’ve got?” And Burney’s momentous reply: “Yes, Prime Minister.” “Okay, Derek,” Mulroney said. “Go ahead.” And so, literally at five minutes to midnight, it was a done deal, though Mulroney would take another full hour to review it with senior cabinet ministers, including Deputy Prime Minister Don Mazankowski and External Affairs Minister Joe Clark. Outside his second floor office, Mulroney turned to Norman Spector, his deputy minister for Federal-Provincial Relations. “Norman,” he said urgently, “call the provinces, call the premiers. Tell them there’s a deal.” Among the first ministers, the same two premiers who had reservations about Meech, Manitoba’s Howard Pawley and Ontario’s David Peterson, were strongly opposed to free trade. Pawley’s objections were ideological—the ndp and the trade unions opposed free trade from the left, fearing that Canadian jobs would disappear. Prince Edward Island’s Joe Ghiz also opposed the trade deal. Peterson’s opposition arose from his concern to protect the branch plant economy of Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Whenever Mulroney would point to the Auto Pact as an example of free trade, Peterson would insist that it was managed trade. After one meeting back at the Langevin Block, Bourassa noted that Peterson was particularly annoyed. “David was not himself today,” Bourassa said. “David n’était pas dans son assiette.” In November 1987, Mulroney called a full-dress First Ministers’ Conference on the economy at the Toronto Hilton Convention Centre, and he made a strong case that Ontario, as well as other regions, would benefit from free trade with the United States. Peterson was not persuaded and tried to turn the meeting into a showcase for Ontario’s efforts for research and development as the key to economic growth. When Peterson finished his presentation, Mulroney turned to a tab in his briefing book and read the following note written for the meeting: “The Government of Canada spends 10 times as much on R&D in Ontario as does the Government of Ontario.” Peterson was both embarrassed and visibly annoyed, trumped on his own issue, in his own backyard. The note had been written by Dan Gagnier, then head of communications for the Federal-Provincial Relations Office. Peterson was so impressed by the manner in which he’d been upstaged that he soon hired Gagnier as his principal secretary at Queen’s Park.

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But seven premiers were solidly on side, with Bourassa and Getty leading the way. “Premier Bourassa was very important,” said John Crosbie, minister of International Trade in the Mulroney government during the bruising period of the fta’s ratification by the voters in the 1988 election. In Quebec, Bourassa led an extraordinary consensus in favor of free trade that included the opposition Parti Québécois, the entire business community, and most opinion-makers. In the 1988 campaign, Mulroney made the most of it, sweeping through Quebec with a theme of solidarity, a powerful and resonant message with Quebecers. “Robert Bourassa supports free trade,” he would thunder from one podium to the next. “Jacques Parizeau supports free trade. Tout le monde l’appuie. Avec l’accord du libre-échange, le Québec a frappé le jackpot.” But John Turner touched a responsive chord in the English television debate of October 25, when he accused Mulroney of betraying the national interest in negotiating the Free Trade Agreement. “I believe you have sold us out,” Turner said, and in the next week, the Liberals actually moved ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, even in Quebec. The campaign had been transformed into a one-issue election, a referendum on free trade. It was the most tumultuous and important campaign in the second half of the twentieth century, with the entire country engaged in a passionate debate on the benefits and costs—economic, cultural, and social—of free trade between Canada and the United States. As Mulroney’s chartered Boeing 727 flew out of Ottawa on November 1 for a crucial week-long western swing, the prime minister buckled himself into his wide seat in the forward cabin. “Turner’s got the momentum,” he said. “Now we’re going to find out what we’re made of.” Still, Bourassa never wavered in his support. On November 9, with the Mulroney tour in southern Ontario, Bourassa called the prime minister’s bus with a simple message: “We’re going to win.” In the end, the Mulroney-Bourassa alliance delivered 63 of Quebec’s 75 seats in a historic endorsement of the Free Trade Agreement, while Alberta saw a clean sweep of 26 Conservative seats. The Quebec-Alberta alliance held, delivering 89 seats out of 170 for the Conservatives in the new 295-seat House of Commons. Free trade was a done deal. Four years later, in 1992, Bourassa would be an equally staunch supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), expanding continental trade to Mexico. In Quebec, there had always been strong support for expanding trade ties north-south, and a strong affinity for the United States, with none of the fears for Canadian cultural sovereignty that marked the election in English-speaking Canada. Quebec’s language and culture

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were in no way threatened by commerce with the United States, but its prosperity had every prospect of being enhanced by liberalized access to the world’s richest market right next door. By all the empirical evidence, the results of free trade later justified Bourassa’s expectations for Quebec, as they did Mulroney’s for Canada. Canadian merchandise exports of $100 billion in 1988, the last year before implementation of the fta, increased to $271 billion a decade later and to $360 billion by 2001. In the first ten years alone, Canadian merchandise exports to the United States increased by 169 percent. In 1988, the United States received 71 percent of Canadian merchandise exports; by 2000, it accounted for 86 percent of Canada’s exports. And where trade in merchandise and services accounted for 23 percent of Canada’s output before the fta, it reached 45 percent of Canada’s gdp in 2001. In a ten-year impact study, Two Cheers for Free Trade, the Royal Bank of Canada’s chief economist, John McCallum, concluded it would be “the coincidence of the century” if the surge in exports wasn’t directly related to free trade. “Between 1989 and 1998, what can only be described as an explosion of Canada–U.S. trade took place,” wrote McCallum, who would go on to become a Liberal mp, then minister of Financial Institutions, and later minister of Defence in the Chrétien government. Peterson’s concerns for the Ontario economy had proven demonstrably unfounded. “Among the provinces,” the Royal Bank impact study noted, “Ontario is uniquely dependent on exports to the United States, with exports to that country accounting for an astounding 40 percent of gdp in 1998, as compared with 20 percent in 1989.” In Quebec, the Royal Bank study found that exports to the United States as a percentage of output grew from 10 percent in 1989 to 25 percent a decade later. On a stand-alone basis, Quebec would be America’s sixth largest trading partner. As Francis Fox, briefly minister of International Trade in the Turner government, noted in a 1999 presentation in his capacity as chairman of Montreal International, the economic promotion agency, “Altogether with trade in services, exports now account for 37 percent of the Quebec economy, up from 20 percent just 10 years ago.” In The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Harvard University’s Michael Porter argued that cities, as well as countries, can develop critical mass and comparative advantage in sectors of the economy. And in a 1991 presentation for the Business Council on National Issues, he suggested that free trade, in and of itself, would make the Canadian economy more competitive on a global basis simply by virtue of competing in the demanding U.S. market.

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In the 1990s, the economy of the Greater Montreal region would emerge as a model of competitive advantage for a city, achieving critical mass in aerospace, pharmaceuticals, information technologies, telecommunications, and networking. With 75 percent of Quebec’s exports in the Montreal region, the role of free trade was clearly evident in the renaissance of Montreal as the motor of the Quebec economy. And it was the Mulroney-Bourassa alliance that delivered free trade for Canada and Quebec. When Mulroney became the first former Canadian prime minister inducted into the Order of Quebec in May 2002, Premier Bernard Landry said “he has given Canada one of the most important gifts in its history. Where would the economic power of Quebec and Canada be,” Landry asked, “without free trade?” The ink was hardly dry on the returns from the 1988 election when the Supreme Court delivered a decision on December 15 that resulted in a serious disagreement between Bourassa and Mulroney, with highly negative implications for the Meech Lake Accord. In a unanimous decision whose release may well have been delayed until after the election, the Supreme Court struck down the interdictions against English in Quebec’s French-only regulations for the language of signs. Quebec’s Bill 101 was ruled unconstitutional. The decision was political dynamite, and Bourassa’s problem was how to defuse it. He must have anticipated the outcome when he challenged a unanimous 1986 ruling in the Quebec Court of Appeal; but in buying time on the language issue by appealing to the Supreme Court, he had also raised the stakes exponentially. “Bourassa always felt that time was an ally in politics,” observed John Parisella, then his deputy chief of staff. “We never showed leadership on this issue, to be frank with you.” The Supreme Court offered Bourassa a way out by ruling that French could have “greater visibility” and even a “marked predominance” in the language of signs, in effect endorsing Bourassa’s own 1985 campaign platform calling for French as the predominant language of signs, but allowing English and others as well. With a Supreme Court stamp of approval on his language policy, he should have been able to impose it on his caucus. Instead, he decided to invoke the constitutional override provisions of the notwithstanding clause to set aside the Supreme Court ruling and introduced new language legislation, Bill 178, which made French the exclusive language of outdoor signs while allowing bilingual commercial signage indoors, with French as the predominant and priority language.

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Overnight, the legislation became known scornfully in the rest of Canada as the inside-outside law. It cost Bourassa three anglophone ministers—Richard French, Clifford Lincoln, and Herbert Marx— who all resigned in protest. It brought the language issue back into Quebec politics going into an election year, firing up an English-rights protest movement, the Equality party, on the one hand, and reviving the pq’s role as the guard dog of the French language on the other. Worst of all, it was a dagger to the heart of the Meech Lake Accord. In an emotional resignation address to the National Assembly, Cliff Lincoln famously declared: “In my belief, rights are rights are rights. There is no such thing as inside rights and outside rights. No such thing as rights for the tall and rights for the short. No such thing as rights for the front and rights for the back, or rights for the east and rights for the west.” Bill 178, and particularly the invoking of the notwithstanding clause, was a disabling blow to the Meech Lake Accord. Having only just introduced his Meech resolution in the Manitoba legislature at the last sitting before Bill 178 was presented in Quebec on Sunday, December 18, Gary Filmon promptly withdrew it on Monday. This ended the isolation of New Brunswick’s year-old Liberal government, led by Frank McKenna, in demanding changes to the accord. For his part, Bourassa cited Meech as the justification for invoking the notwithstanding clause. “It was,” he said, “accepted by all governments in Canada in the Meech Lake Accord that we have the role, the responsibility to promote the French culture.” This was a major error of judgment. Instead of the blame going to Pierre Trudeau and the notwithstanding clause, the Trojan horse that came with his Charter, the culprits became Bourassa and the distinct society clause of the Meech Lake Accord. “It was very bad,” Mulroney acknowledged years later. “It left Meech very damaged and badly wounded. In the minds of most people in English-speaking Canada, the notwithstanding clause was part of Meech, when in fact it was part of the 1982 Constitution.” On the Sunday that Bourassa announced Bill 178 and his decision to invoke the notwithstanding clause, Mulroney and Peterson each had several conversations with him, imploring him not to do it. “I remember, specifically, sitting in my car and calling him,” Peterson recalled. “I must have called several times. I pleaded with him, and told him it would kill Meech Lake. It had everything to do with Meech Lake and nothing to do with Meech Lake.” From the pm’s weekend residence at Harrington Lake, Mulroney recalled: “I had a series of conversations in which I urged him not to

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do this. I told him it could be the end of Meech Lake. “Robert,” Mulroney said, “Don’t do this. It will probably mean the end for Meech. Trudeau and his friends will use that.” As Mulroney later recalled, “He told me that what persuaded him to do it was that if he didn’t invoke the notwithstanding clause, Claude Ryan was going to resign.” John Parisella would confirm this version of events in diplomatic terms. “I’m told,” Parisella said, “that Mr. Ryan sent out signals that he wanted to go to a notwithstanding clause, and that this might have been decisive.” For all the history between them, Bourassa still regarded Ryan as an important bridge to the intellectual community, and he had not only encouraged him to remain as a member of the National Assembly in 1985 but had named him Education minister, a key cabinet post for which he was eminently qualified from a lifetime of activism in the Quebec education movement. Ryan evidently thought that the notwithstanding clause was legitimate: it was there for a reason; it was part of the Constitution; and Quebec should avail itself of it. “I don’t believe you,” Mulroney replied. “Ryan would never do that.” “I’m telling you,” Bourassa insisted, “Ryan told me personally he would resign if I didn’t invoke the notwithstanding clause.” Short of calling Bourassa on it and phoning Ryan himself, thus undercutting his own relationship with the premier, Mulroney could only express his deep disappointment in the course that Quebec had chosen, with a terrible foreboding of its implications for Meech. In any event, Bourassa had already decided his course of action the previous day, after a brisk walk on the Dufferin Terrace adjoining the Château Frontenac. “I’ve just taken a long walk on the Terrace, and I’ve made a decision,” he informed Ronald Poupart at the Bunker on the Saturday afternoon. “I prefer the Quebec solution to the Canadian one.” “You realize,” Poupart told him, “that you’re putting Meech at risk.” “I know,” Bourassa replied. For Bourassa, it was simply a question, as he often put it, that “to govern is to choose.” He chose to be seen as an advocate of Quebec’s linguistic and cultural imperatives, and after Bill 178, he was never again perceived as inadequately defending the interests of Quebec. Later, Bourassa and other members of his government would downplay the consequences of the notwithstanding clause and Bill 178 in the demise of the Meech Lake Accord. “Did the government play the role of sorcerer’s apprentice in Bill 178?” Bourassa asked in Gouverner le Québec. He thought not, that among other things, “Mr.

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Trudeau had begun his crusade against Meech Lake well before the adoption of Bill 178.” At another level, he maintained, “I had to choose in Quebec’s interest . . . and in my opinion French was not yet sufficiently consolidated as the priority language in Quebec to accept on an integral basis the judgment of the Supreme Court. That was my priority.” “The notwithstanding clause didn’t kill Meech Lake. Trudeau killed Meech Lake,” said John Ciaccia, the lone non-francophone member of the Bourassa cabinet who did not resign over Bill 178. “The notwithstanding clause had nothing to do with Elijah Harper and his feather. It had nothing to do with Clyde Wells.” Yet the effects of the notwithstanding clause and Bill 178 were highly damaging to the consensus around Meech Lake. So was Quebec’s massive support for the Free Trade Agreement, which contributed to a sense of abandonment in certain parts of English-speaking Canada, particularly among the cultural elites, trade unions, and interest groups who had so strongly opposed the fta in the 1988 campaign. “I think that’s true,” Mulroney would venture many years later. “That’s a very good and interesting point. The same people who supported Trudeau on Meech, for example, in Toronto, The Star, the cbc, and the chattering classes, all opposed free trade as well.” But the ndp, which supported Meech on the left, felt particularly betrayed by Quebec’s massive endorsement of the fta, which had further eroded support for Meech in English-speaking Canada. Bill 178 and the notwithstanding clause were also damaging to the core coalition of the Quebec Liberals and boosted the pq to the extent that the language issue was brought back into play. For the second time in his career, Bourassa seriously misread his anglophone constituency, assuming they had nowhere else to go and would always vote Liberal to allay their fears of the separatist menace. Angry over his Bill 22, declaring French Quebec’s official language in 1974, anglophones had deserted him in droves to vote for the Union Nationale in 1976. Equally, in 1989, many anglophones would move to the fledgling Equality party. A fringe movement on the margins of Quebec politics, it suddenly became a respectable place to register a protest vote. On August 9, 1989, Bourassa dropped the writ for a forty-seven-day campaign leading to a vote on September 25. He was seeking his fourth term as premier, something no Quebec politician had achieved since Maurice Duplessis. If his message had been change in 1985, it was continuity in 1989, in an election that he called for no other reason than that it was nearly four years since the last one. In the absence of a defining issue, the campaign became framed as a series of breaking

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news stories. As a result, no sooner had Bourassa called the election than he lost control of the news agenda. First there was the “Ship of Death,” the shipment of toxic pcbs from a 1988 fire at Saint-Basile-le-Grand that finally found a home in BaieComeau. Then there was a series of wildcat strikes, including an illegal walkout by Quebec nurses beginning on September 5, less than three weeks before the election. “In the first part of the campaign Bourassa seemed to be a leader besieged,’ Parisella would recall. “There was a feeling that there was lead in the wings.” Furthermore, there was the “angryphone” vote in Liberal strongholds on the West Island of Montreal. Since Jacques Parizeau trailed by double digits in most of the polls, these disgruntled Liberals knew they were in no imminent danger of electing the pq. But the language issue worked for Parizeau in another sense in that it motivated his core voters to turn out for the pq. Where he might otherwise have slipped below Pierre Marc Johnson’s 38 percent of the vote in 1985, Parizeau was able to recuperate a respectable 40 percent in 1989. Thus the pq and its option, remained viable. Bourassa finally regained control of the agenda in the last week of the campaign when he went to the union town of Sainte-Thérèse on September 19 and put the nurses, and organized labor, on notice that he was running Quebec. Not only were the nurses out illegally, but teachers and public servants had taken selective legal strike action in the middle of the campaign. The previous evening, he had called in press secretary Ronald Poupart and given him unusual instructions. “I want you to tell the media that I’m going to make an important statement tomorrow night at 9 o’clock.” “They’ll go crazy,” Poupart replied. “The television guys will all miss their deadlines.” “Just do it,” Bourassa ordered. At Sainte-Thérèse, he framed the issue of the illegal nurses’ strike, as well as interruptions of other essential services, in a simple headline: “Qui mène au Québec?” It was front-page headlines in all the next day’s papers, and on all the next day’s television newscasts, there were pictures of the headlines. “That’s what I wanted,” Bourassa told Poupart. “I wanted the print headline, and I wanted the visuals of television showing the newspapers in the kiosks.” He also wanted the nurses and the leaders of the csn, the ceq, and the ftq to know that he was the boss, and would still be the boss on the morning after the election. They understood that he was putting them on notice, right in a union town. “There’s a new issue in this campaign—who’s in charge in Quebec?” Bourassa declared at Sainte-Thérèse. “We will not give in to electoral

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blackmail.” Quebecers, he said, “cannot accept that illegal strikes disrupt the democratic process.” It was, finally, the defining moment of the campaign, and it locked in his lead in the polls. In the end, Bourassa scored nearly 50 percent of the popular vote, and a sweeping majority of 92 seats out of 125 in the National Assembly, this time including his own, Saint-Laurent. The pq won 29 seats. And the Equality party, with only 3.7 percent of the vote, won a remarkable 4 seats—and not just any four seats, but D’Arcy McGee, Westmount, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, and Jacques Cartier, all suburban Montreal ridings where the Liberals were accustomed to racking up some of their biggest majorities in the province. “Quebec society is fascinating to govern,” said Bourassa in his subdued victory speech, adding that the challenges of the coming decade would be “passionate and demanding.” It was more like a lecture in political science from one who had seen it all, as indeed he had. But the alienation of Quebec’s English-speaking minority was another stick in the spoke for the Meech Lake Accord, which in the fall of 1989 was facing a new hurdle following the election that spring of Clyde Wells and the Liberals in Newfoundland. The Newfoundland House of Assembly had passed the Meech resolution on Brian Peckford’s watch as premier, but Wells threatened to rescind it unless the accord was reopened for changes. Newfoundland uniquely opposed something it had adopted—eight provinces had ratified the accord, but only seven now supported it. The constitutional drama would play itself out soon enough. By an odd quirk of the 1982 Constitution Act, a clock started ticking the day Quebec became the first legislature to ratify the accord on June 23, 1987. If Parliament and all ten legislatures did not approve Meech Lake within three years, the accord would die on June 23, 1990. At the time Meech was signed at the Langevin Block, all the first ministers undertook to present it to their legislatures “as soon as possible.” Three of them—David Peterson, Howard Pawley, and Richard Hatfield—were facing elections. Peterson was looking at a walkover. Pawley was confronting defeat. Hatfield was facing annihilation. In the New Brunswick election of October 13, 1987, Liberal leader Frank McKenna would win all 58 seats in the legislature. Hatfield had called hearings on the Meech Lake Accord during the summer; but he never got around to calling a vote. Mulroney had been on Hatfield’s case. As the former prime minister recalled it, he said: “Richard, we’ve got to get this thing ratified.” Hatfield’s failure to do so meant that, with McKenna seeking amendments to the accord, it no longer enjoyed the unanimous approval needed to secure its passage.

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By the fall of 1989, with three provinces opposing the accord, its prospects appeared increasingly uncertain. And all the while, a clock that had been set on the floor of the Quebec National Assembly became a ticking time bomb.

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25 Annus Horribilis, 1990

It was the year Meech died, the year of the Oka Crisis, the year Robert Bourassa was diagnosed with melanoma. It was 1990, his annus horribilis. Within a three-month period, the constitutional accord expired, the native crisis exploded, and the premier’s illness left the government leaderless at a time of bitter recriminations from the death of Meech Lake, while the Oka Crisis seriously undermined Quebec’s reputation as a tolerant society around the world. Bourassa’s year began, uneventfully enough, with his annual trip to Europe and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, at the end of January. A decade later, Davos would become a target of antiglobalization guerrilla forces, and the conference would be virtually sealed off from the outside world. As The New York Times would put it in 2002, “While no policy is set there—the attraction is networking among the powerful—the forum has become an icon of global capitalism.” Even in 1990, Davos was already the annual meeting of the world’s movers and shakers, from the ceos of Fortune 500 companies to the heads of government from around the globe to a host of leading academic and cultural figures. For Bourassa, it was a good place to hang out and a pretext for visits to major European business capitals. The one European capital he generally avoided was Paris—he detested the pomp that went with visits to France, and he disliked the inevitable triangular diplomacy involving Paris, Quebec, and Ottawa. In January 1990, only two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world’s attention was riveted on Germany. Bourassa began a

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ten-day European swing with stops in four German cities, Bonn, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf. He met with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, as he would later meet with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in London. But even as he talked with German bankers and investors, Bourassa couldn’t escape the looming June 23 deadline for ratification of the Meech Lake Accord. Even the Europeans were asking questions about the political and financial stability of Quebec and Canada in the event of Meech’s demise. On January 29 in Bonn, Bourassa met journalists travelling with his entourage and speculated that the failure of Meech might result in some of kind of new “political superstructure” in Quebec and Canada. Just what he did he mean by that? “It’s up to you to interpret my words, according to your own experience,” Bourassa said opaquely. He then went up to his hotel suite, accompanied by John Ciaccia, his minister of International Relations. “So, what did you think of that?” Bourassa asked. “That’ll be coast to coast tonight,” Ciaccia replied. He later said he thought Bourassa “was trying to keep the idea of change alive,” in the event that Meech failed, “by giving that as an example.” But Bourassa also decided to leave it at that and instructed Ciaccia not to take any questions on the issue. No one was ever sure, then or later, what Bourassa meant by a “political superstructure.” When he ambiguously evoked the European Community, forerunner of the European Union, he was reminded that its members were all sovereign states. Reporters then remembered, or were reminded by aides, that Bourassa had recently said that Quebecers’ confidence in federalism was “not unlimited” and that federalism was not “the only eternal option” for Quebec. In Ottawa, the prime minister was annoyed by Bourassa’s sabre-rattling on Meech. “It was clearly another one of his improvisations,” Mulroney said many years later. “One more case of trying to stay one step ahead of the game.” “I chose that term, in a press conference, to reassure foreign investors,” Bourassa later explained in his 1995 memoir, Gouverner le Québec. “To that end, it seemed to me important to affirm the logical opportunity of a superstructure in Canada. But politics is not always pure logic.” Nor was it pure logic on May 17, when Ottawa released the unanimous recommendations on Meech Lake of an all-party committee chaired by Conservative mp Jean Charest. The Charest report, with its twenty-three recommendations, was essentially about positioning in the run-up to a last-ditch First Ministers’ Conference on the constitutional accord. The strategic goal was to keep Meech supporters in the

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tent and make room in it for the dissenting provinces, notably New Brunswick, where Premier Frank McKenna was moving onside. Charest was then serving time as a backbencher, following his resignation as minister of Youth and Amateur Sport over a phone call to a judge, to whom he had written on behalf of a Quebec athlete, appealing a disqualification from the Canadian Commonwealth Games team in Auckland, New Zealand, in January 1990. “I understand you want me to explain the contents of my letter,” Charest told the judge, who replied in the negative. Charest quickly terminated the conversation, but he knew as a lawyer he should never have placed the call in the first place. He immediately resigned from cabinet, telling the prime minister, “It’s the end of my political career. I’ve ruined everything.” Mulroney saw the chairmanship of the parliamentary task force as a way back for the promising young former minister, but it was only at the insistence of Lucien Bouchard that Charest agreed to take it on. “You’re the one who should chair this committee,” Bouchard told him over dinner with their wives one night at the home of Camille Guibault, Quebec caucus liaison in the pm’s office. From March through May 1990, the Charest committee became a parliamentary show in search of an all-party consensus. Charest’s report was rather like the famous Certs advertisement: “Certs is a candy mint. Certs is a breath mint. Stop, you’re both right.” It recommended passage of Meech as is—the candy mint. But it also proposed a companion accord—the breath mint. This was along the lines of a parallel proposal that had been jointly developed in March by New Brunswick and federal officials. Charest’s committee proposed a companion accord affirming that the distinct society would not override the Charter. It also asserted Ottawa’s duty to promote, as well as preserve, minority language rights in federal jurisdictions. Each was a non-starter with Quebec, and Bourassa dismissed the Charest report on the day of its release. Quite apart from its substantial recommendations, there was a problem with the packaging. Quebec had been at the table for three years on the basis of five conditions. Now, only a month before the Meech deadline, a parliamentary committee was coming back with twenty-three more. But Bourassa also understood that Charest’s report was about placating the dissenting provinces and getting them to a last-chance conference on Meech. “He understood that we needed some running room,” Mulroney said in 2002. “He knew that there would be no changes to Meech.” But then Mulroney’s margin of maneuver, and Bourassa’s, was suddenly reduced practically to zero, with the dramatic resignation of Lucien Bouchard from his cabinet and caucus over the Victoria Day weekend. Bouchard had been in Bergen, Norway, attending an

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international conference, before flying out to Paris on May 17, as the Charest report was being released in Ottawa. As senior Quebec minister, he had already told his colleagues at a Mont-Tremblant retreat that they owed it to Mulroney to remain in caucus until the clock ran out on Meech. As a nationalist, he retained and cultivated his network in the sovereignty movement. As a person, in the private reaches of his mind, he was often motivated by a hidden agenda. All of those conflicting emotions and contending forces in his life would come into play during that long weekend. Bouchard was staying at the residence of former Mulroney press secretary Marc Lortie, who had returned to the foreign service as economic minister at the Paris embassy. The Charest report was faxed to Bouchard care of the embassy. Furious at its recommendations on the distinct society and duality clause, he refused to take Charest’s repeated calls. Subsequently, he refused even to take a call from Paul Tellier, the clerk of the Privy Council, calling the official residence of a serving Canadian diplomat on behalf of the prime minister of Canada. From Paris on May 18, Bouchard sent an effusive telegram of solidarity to a pq meeting at Alma in his own riding of Lac-Saint-Jean, on the tenth anniversary of the 1980 referendum—the pq, uniquely among political parties in North America, celebrates its defeats. Recalling the “the sincerity, the pride and the generosity” of the Yes option they had proposed a decade earlier, Bouchard added: “The memory of René Lévesque will unite us all this weekend. It was he who led Quebecers to realize their inalienable right to determine their own destiny.” The telegram, which had clearly been pre-arranged with Bouchard’s mentor, Marc-André Bédard, created an immediate sensation, and not just in the room where it was read out by pq leader Jacques Parizeau. “I can’t let that stand,” Mulroney said grimly the next morning. “He’s going to have clarify his statement or resign.” “Lots will be happening tomorrow,” Bouchard promised reporters on his return to Mirabel on the Sunday. Lots did happen, none of it good for Mulroney, Bourassa, or the Meech Lake Accord. Despite a long dinner in Ottawa on Sunday with his former chief of staff, Luc Lavoie, who had been sent on Mulroney’s behalf, Bouchard was adamant that the Charest report represented a betrayal of Meech and a capitulation to Jean Chrétien, who had been party to backroom negotiations on the all-party consensus. In one of those ironic historical footnotes, Chrétien would become Liberal leader on June 23, the day Meech died. On Monday, May 21, Bouchard spent the day writing a long letter of resignation to Mulroney, full of recriminations and self-justification

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for his decision. When Bernard Roy, his law school classmate and former Mulroney chief of staff, was brought in from Montreal to try to reason with him, Bouchard at first refused even to see the prime minister. “Some day I’ll have to choose between my friendship with Brian and my love of Quebec,” he had predicted to a close acquaintance after the 1988 election. Finally, at the end of the afternoon, Bouchard relented and went to 24 Sussex, where the two old friends met in the prime minister’s study. After an hour or so, as old hands at negotiations, they both knew the outcome. “Lucien,” Mulroney said, “if you’re not going to help me out on this, I’m going to have to ask for your resignation.” “I have it right here,” Bouchard said, handing over his letter. There was an awkward moment between them as they stood in the front hallway and waited for Bouchard’s car to come round. “Whatever happens,” Mulroney said quietly. “We’ll always be friends.” They never spoke again. “Bouchard also knew there would be no changes to Meech itself,” Mulroney later maintained. “He was looking for a way out.” On reflection, years later, Mulroney would say: “I don’t know how I could have known someone for thirty years, and not known him at all.” But even then, the former prime minister would acknowledge that Premier Bouchard had defended his honor in 1996, when he said that “the Brian Mulroney I know could never have done anything like that”— referring to the criminal allegations made by the Chrétien government in what columnist Lysiane Gagnon called “the Airbus frame-up.” Bouchard’s resignation on Victoria Day, his dark speech in the House of Commons the next day, and his sensational appearance at the Chambre de Commerce in Montreal the following day dominated the news cycle in Quebec for an entire week. As much as Bourassa might have preferred to ignore the event, he decided he must try to turn the resignation to his, and Quebec’s, advantage, in the final month of the Meech saga. “I obviously regret the resignation of Mr. Bouchard from the federal government,” he told the National Assembly on May 23. “I noted when he was elected in a by-election that he could play an important role on the federal scene. “He decided to leave the federal government and he did it with dignity. I hope his action will force those in English Canada who need to think about their understanding of Quebec to think.” Gil Rémillard, the minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, pointedly added: “It’s a resignation in favor of Meech. I saw his speech in the Commons. Mr. Bouchard ended by saying Quebec is extending a hand of friendship to the rest of Canada, possibly for the last time.”

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On June 3, 1990, the third anniversary of the formal signing of the Meech Lake Accord, Mulroney invited the premiers to a working dinner at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, with its spectacular views across the Ottawa River to Parliament Hill. Either it was going to be the last supper for Meech, or the prime minister and premiers would reconvene the next day in a First Ministers’ Conference. In the event, the meeting would last a week, with the first ministers sequestered on the fifth floor of the National Conference Centre and hundreds of media camped outside. As Clyde Wells would say a week later at a late-night signing ceremony, it was “the conclusion of the longest dinner meeting on record.” Over the previous week, all ten premiers had been to 24 Sussex for bilateral sessions with the prime minister, the longest being a meeting between Mulroney and Wells that went on for over four hours. Wells, who had followed through with his threat to rescind the Meech Lake Accord in his legislature in April, was finally indicating that he would come to a meeting with an open mind. “My sense during the dinner, partly because of my one-on-one meetings with the premiers, was that we would go forward,” Mulroney would recall. “I was trying to point the way to an acceptable solution for everyone. It’s difficult enough to manage ten premiers, but in three instances we were trying to manage their successors, who had changed the positions of their provinces.” Mulroney spoke to the matter of Quebec’s absent signature. “I tried to make the case of the benefits to Canada if we could wrap this up and put it behind us,” he said, “and what a blow it would be to the separatists if you removed their most powerful argument, a blank in the Constitution where Quebec’s signature should be. I knew that it would be important in any future referendum.” Indeed, this would prove to be a leading argument of the sovereignists in the 1995 referendum. But it was Bourassa who made the most telling arguments and the strongest impression at that opening dinner, speaking without notes, and entirely in English for the benefit of his colleagues. As he spoke, Lowell Murray took verbatim notes. “I was elected in 1985 on an economic platform,” Bourassa began. “I also said, let’s look for a face-saving solution to reintegrate Quebec in the Constitution. The best face-saver, it seemed to me, was to demand five things that had been offered to Quebec in the past.” He continued: “I was very happy three years ago, when we signed the Meech Lake Accord. A constitutional settlement would let Canada get on with the job of integrating into the international economy, of tackling environmental problems, and so on.” But then, Bourassa wondered, how had it come to this? “What a surprise and disappointment the past three years have brought with the

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opposition to Meech Lake,” he said. “Imagine, dismantling a country because of a constitutional theory. What a waste of energy! I have a great sadness tonight. One of the most privileged countries in the world, meeting in such a dramatic atmosphere. Four hundred journalists outside, speculating on the breakup of the country.” Bourassa then spoke with uncharacteristic pessimism about the pressures and prospects for a referendum in Quebec in the event Meech failed. “I’m very worried,” he said, “we would lose a referendum on sovereignty-association today. The federal system will be difficult enough to defend in the next few years, with fiscal pressures, the gst and so on. As a Canadian, I am worried about what happens if Meech Lake fails. There will be public pressure for a referendum. My cabinet and caucus will be split about half and half between federalism and sovereignty-association.” Finally, Bourassa came to the heart of the matter—the distinct society and the duality clause, in light of the Charter. For him, Charest’s recommendation of promoting, as well as preserving, minority language rights was completely unnecessary and, in any event, completely unacceptable to Quebec. “There is no need for a federal promotion clause,” he said, “to upset the balance that already exists in that clause between the distinct society and linguistic duality.” Bourassa concluded his intervention by staring the prospect of failure directly in the face. “Some of you have a political problem about Meech Lake,” he told his colleagues, “but it is nothing compared to the political problem the whole country would have if Meech Lake failed.” Long afterwards, David Peterson would remember the skill with which Bourassa marshaled his arguments and the dignified manner in which he presented them. “He explained the pressures he was under,” Peterson would recall. “He was very thoughtful.” It had come to this because Richard Hatfield had failed to ratify Meech in the New Brunswick legislature before calling his election in October 1987. His successor, Frank McKenna, had several reopeners, including reaffirming the equality of the two official language communities in New Brunswick. Like Mulroney, McKenna could never understand why Hatfield hadn’t put it to a vote as early as June 1987. “I’m certain that we would have voted for it,” he would say in 2002. “We were clear that we would never refuse to enact it. It was quite a shock that he didn’t enact it.” It had come to this because Gary Filmon had pulled his Meech resolution after Bourassa invoked the notwithstanding clause and introduced Bill 178 in Quebec in December 1988. And as the head of a minority government, Filmon needed either ndp leader Gary Doer or Liberal leader Sharon Carstairs, an outspoken opponent

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of Meech, to ratify any eleventh-hour agreement in the Manitoba legislature. And it had come to this because Clyde Wells, who had been elected premier of Newfoundland in the spring of 1989, was clearly opposed to Meech and went so far as to rescind Newfoundland’s approval in April 1990, a constitutional first that Conservative leader Tom Rideout angrily denounced as “a day of infamy for Canada.” It wasn’t as if Wells hadn’t warned his colleagues of his intentions at his first federal-provincial conference in Ottawa in November 1989. And it wasn’t as if the other first ministers hadn’t been warned about Wells, about his rigid positions and intellectual pretensions. The November conference opened with a dinner at the National Gallery, where Wells received a rude welcome. McKenna, by now looking to pass rather than thwart Meech, ripped into him. “Clyde,” McKenna told him, “this constitutional lawyer status you’ve given yourself is absolute bullshit. What you are is a lawyer from Corner Brook. You’re no constitutional lawyer any more than I am.” Wells was always talking about his “principled” opposition to Meech. “The more he talked of his principles,” McKenna said later, “the more I counted my spoons.” “He wore the mantle of a constitutional lawyer, which he wasn’t,” Peterson said more than a decade later. “He was impossible. He was incredibly arrogant.” On the first day, the talks went nowhere, and at the end of the day, as if to give them a jump-start, McKenna publicly endorsed the accord. After being the first holdout, he was the first of the dissenting premiers to move onside, without even exacting a price for his support, although he had in March first proposed the notion of a parallel accord, now clearly in the offing. “That had all been worked out in advance,” McKenna said long afterwards. “The timing was negotiated with Ottawa to try to give it some momentum.” Many years later, he would observe: “I could never fathom how the whole process could fail. The companion accord was the bridge that allowed us to cross the ravine, from the Quebec round to the Canada round.” In the end, the only part of the Meech and companion accords to survive was the agreement between Ottawa and Fredericton to entrench the equality of New Brunswick’s official language communities. “The irony,” said McKenna, “is that we, New Brunswick, were the only ones to win anything.” The one thing he did get immediately was an American Hockey League franchise for Fredericton. This was a direct result of a New Brunswick–Quebec alliance. “It had been going to go to Albany, but instead it went to Fredericton,” recalled John Parisella, by then Bourassa’s chief of staff. After McKenna asked for his help, Bourassa called Montreal Canadiens general manager Serge

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Savard and made the case for locating the ahl farm club of les glorieux in New Brunswick. Savard, winner of eight Stanley Cups with the Canadiens, was also a political junkie who was only too happy to oblige Bourassa. On the Tuesday, the first ministers agreed to a five-year timeline for Senate reform. There would be an elected Senate by 1995, with equitable representation for the less populous provinces and a redistribution of Senate seats to under-represented provinces in the event the reform process failed. By Thursday, the elements of a companion accord had taken shape, to provide even more comfort on the distinct society. In addition to the non-derogation clause added at the Langevin, Bourassa would accept as an addendum a legal opinion that “the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms will be interpreted in a manner consistent with the duality/distinct society clause . . . but the rights and freedoms guaranteed thereunder are not infringed or denied by the application of the clause.” The opinion was signed by six of the country’s leading constitutional authorities, including two eminent Quebecers, Roger Tassé, Ottawa’s outside counsel and the author of the Charter, and Gérald Beaudoin, professor of law at the University of Ottawa. In the companion accord, Bourassa also accepted that the gender equality rights clause of the Charter be added to section 16 of the Meech Lake Accord, protecting multicultural and aboriginal rights. There was also to be a new process of constitutional conferences on aboriginal rights that would include the First Peoples and the territories and an agreement that territories could gain provincial status by a simple vote of Parliament. And there would be an elected, equitable Senate. “There were a lot of good ideas in the companion accord,” Mulroney would say in 2002. “There was a good number of things in there that would have been good for the country, such as an elected Senate, and the aboriginal process, that have been lost.” Bourassa conceded significant ground in the companion accord in order to keep the Meech accord itself whole. Considerable comfort had been given, not only to the advocates of Senate reform and the Charter Canadians, but to feminists and others, such as aboriginals and the territories, who had been playing interest group politics to the hilt. “Robert moved a very long way to save the accord,” David Peterson would say many years later. “And he did so in a hypercharged atmosphere, with Jacques Parizeau and the French press on his back.” Even so, from Monday through Thursday, the distinct society dominated the talks, until Bourassa had heard enough. At the end of the day Thursday, he put out a communiqué that he would “abstain from

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any further discussion” of the distinct society clause. In other words, he was prepared to walk. “For me,” Bourassa said in a 1995 lecture for Gouverner le Québec, “this issue had been settled and endorsed on two occasions, in April and June of 1987. Finally, it seemed to me useless to continue to participate in discussions on this question.” Usually the most phlegmatic and pragmatic man at the table, he finally exploded in anger when Wells brought back a bunch of further conditions from a side meeting on Thursday afternoon with Filmon and the two Manitoba opposition leaders, Carstairs and Doer. As Frank McKenna would recall that moment, Bourassa turned to Wells and said: “You will save your vanity and lose your country.” Lowell Murray, who was taking notes, would have the same recollection. Wells was subjected to the most intense pressure inside the room and outside. In his own delegation, his constitutional adviser, Deborah Coyne, strongly urged him to hold the line. She was a direct pipeline from Pierre Trudeau, and everyone at the conference knew it, though not the full extent. Ten months later, she would register the birth of her daughter, Sarah, naming Pierre Elliott Trudeau as the father. But Jean Chrétien, who would become Liberal leader in only two weeks, wanted Meech off the table, especially in Quebec, and through Newfoundland back channels such as Liberal mp Brian Tobin, he was urging Wells to make a deal. Three of Chrétien’s closest advisers— Eddie Goldenberg, John Rae, and Eric Maldoff—had been working another back channel with pmo chief of staff Stanley Hartt. The threesome met Wells and Carstairs for breakfast at the Château Laurier on Friday morning and urged them to make a deal. On Friday, however, the talks bogged down again over Senate reform, and Wells was ready to walk, as was Filmon, whose proposed Canada clause would be delayed until the next round. Wells said he would be holding a news conference on the way out. “At this point,” recalled David Peterson, “Joe Ghiz launched into the toughest speech I’ve ever heard.” “Clyde,” Ghiz told Wells, “your vanity will destroy the country.” Now it was Wells’s turn to be flushed with anger. “I have had enough,” he said, as quoted by Maclean’s. “I am going home.” And with that, Wells gathered his dignity and his papers, pushed back from the table, and got up to leave. At that moment, Alberta’s Don Getty, the old Edmonton Eskimo quarterback, got between Wells and the door and asked him to stay. “What is it exactly that you want?” Peterson asked. “What do you really need to do this?” Wells replied that it was Senate reform. At that point, Peterson pulled a rabbit out of the constitutional hat.

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Sensing that Friday would be make or break for the conference, he had drawn his officials and advisers aside during the lunch break. Peterson had gathered some of the best and brightest constitutional minds in the country, including Peter Russell and Katherine Swinton from the University of Toronto and Peter Hogg, Jamie Cameron, and James McPherson from Osgoode Hall law school at York University. “Everyone’s getting ready to leave,” Peterson told his advisers. “This thing is gone. We need something to blow up the iceberg and get the water moving.” There was a five-year timeline in place for Senate reform, but no agreement on who would give up what seats in Senate redistribution in the event the process failed to produce an elected upper house. “Clyde’s got his back up about the Senate,” Peterson told his team. “Give me something. Give me an idea.” Jim McPherson put forward the idea of Ontario giving up six of its twenty-four Senate seats and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia each giving up two of their ten seats. The six Ontario and four Maritime seats would then be redistributed to Newfoundland and the four western provinces, increasing their representation from six to eight seats each. Quebec would retain its twenty-four Senate seats. Peterson immediately seized on the idea. “We’ll give up some seats,” he said. But we can’t be the only ones. The others will have to go along with it. Do the math. And don’t discuss this with anyone.” In a state of excitement, he walked across to the Château Laurier and called his wife. “Shelley,” he told her, “I’ve got the solution to save Meech. But I could lose the election on this.” Indeed, Peterson would lose an early election in September, in no small measure because of Meech and his offer to relinquish Senate seats, as well as his close association with Bourassa. When the accord finally died, Peterson flew to Montreal for a highly photographed solidarity meeting with Bourassa on June 25. “That’s when Peterson’s numbers started to tank,” recalled Conservative strategist John Laschinger, who was then running the Mike Harris campaign for the Ontario Tories. Whatever the consequences down the road, Peterson’s offer immediately broke the impasse. “You don’t play the card unless you have the opening,” he said. Ghiz’s tough speech, Wells heading for the door, and Getty blocking it provided the opportunity. “This is the moment,” Peterson told his principal secretary, Dan Gagnier, “and I’m going to do it.” “Clyde,” Peterson told Wells back in the fifth-floor conference room. “I’ll give up six Senate seats. That’s our guarantee.” Peterson regarded the possibility of having to do so as remote “and down the road,” only if the reform process failed to produce an elected and equi-

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table Senate within five years. “This,” he said, “was about assuaging one man, Clyde Wells, and his inflated vanity, to give him something that he could say he had won at the table.” He would go home with two more Senate seats in the event the reform process failed. “Okay,” Wells said presently. “It’s a deal.” Afterwards, everyone would agree that Peterson’s generous gesture had been the deal-maker. At the televised signing ceremony the next night, Bourassa extolled the Ontario premier’s role. “The statesmanship that he has shown all this crucial week for the future of Canada,” Bourassa noted, “his ability to reach all the regions, was a key factor in the success of this enterprise, and I want to salute him as a friend and as a neighbor.” Even Wells joined in the chorus of praise for Peterson’s “magnanimous” concession, saying that “in the darkest hour of the meetings, he stood tall as a Canadian.” “David Peterson demonstrated qualities of nation-building worthy of Sir John A. Macdonald,” Mulroney would say more than a decade later. “If leadership means searching in difficult times to do the right thing for Canada, then David Peterson’s role throughout Meech was magnificent. He was fair-minded, open-minded, generous, and resolute. He did a tremendous amount of good.” While officials worked on a final draft of the companion accord, the first ministers sat down to a long dinner. When they finally left the building near midnight, Bourassa was prepared to say that peace was at hand. And why not? Though he had made some important concessions in the companion accord, he had kept the essence of Meech intact. And in the deal on the Senate, he had kept Quebec’s twenty-four seats, while Ontario, whose population was one-third larger than Quebec’s, would be reduced to eighteen seats if there was no agreement on an elected and equitable Senate by 1995. “The mission is accomplished,” Bourassa declared to the microphones. “It’s a great day for Canada.” But it wasn’t. There would be a daylong storm and fury with Wells on the Saturday over what became known as “the missing clause.” This was a ten-year review of the distinct society and its impact, if any, on the Charter. It disappeared because federal officials knew it was unacceptable to Bourassa and had never presented it to him, but they neglected to inform Wells, who went ballistic when it failed to turn up in the final draft of the communiqué late on Friday night. His anger and sense of betrayal held throughout the day Saturday, and no amount of apologies by Mulroney would mollify him. “I am not approving of this particular accord,” a highly stressed Wells told reporters on Saturday afternoon. The final Meech accord and companion agreement were presented late on Saturday night, into Sunday

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morning, with an asterisk beside his signature. Wells promised he would present the accord to his legislature or to his voters in a quickie referendum, but he would not recommend it. Nevertheless, Mulroney decided to proceed with a full signing ceremony in the familiar federal-provincial theater of the conference center. As the ceremony began, Mulroney leaned over to Lowell Murray, sitting beside him, and whispered: “Eat your heart out, Lucien.” Years later, Murray ruefully admitted that “our triumph was short-lived,” but he maintained that “if Meech had succeeded, Lucien’s resignation from the cabinet would have been a footnote to history.” “In the conference foreground,” Mulroney told the country, “the Meech Lake Accord debate has been about commas and colons and interpretive clauses and preambles. But in the national background, it has been about bilingualism and multiculturalism, and about alienation and favoritism, and it has been about rejection.” However, as he pointed out, the alliance of Quebec and Ottawa and the assenting provinces had held up over three long and difficult years. “Never,” Mulroney said pointedly as he introduced Bourassa, “never has Quebec risked being isolated around this constitutional table” as it was in 1981–82. Like his colleagues, Bourassa was too tired for rejoicing. But he had clearly won the day. “For the first time in its history,” he began, “Quebec sees its distinct character recognized in the Constitution. English Canada has understood and accepted that we are recognized for who we are.” And he concluded on a note that would later become an historic quotation: “For many Quebecers, since 1981, on the occasion of the exclusion of Quebec from the Canadian constitution, Canada was a legal country. Now, with the ratification of the Meech Lake Accord, for all Quebecers, Canada is a real country.” On the way home, the premier told the Quebec reporters in his entourage that he had probably “bought a generation” of constitutional peace. But as events would have it, Bourassa had spoken too soon. After the signing ceremony, Brian and Mila Mulroney went home to 24 Sussex for a late-night bite with her special assistant, Bonnie Brownlee, and her husband, Bill Fox, formerly the prime minister’s communications director and then a communications consultant in Ottawa. By the time Mulroney got to bed, it was past 4 a.m., and when he awoke only a few hours later that Sunday morning, he started working the phones, as was his habit—indeed, his addiction—of many years. He called a number of prominent Meech supporters, including Eric Kierans, Jack Pickersgill, Stephen Lewis, and Ed Broadbent, to thank them for their help.

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One of the people on his list was William Thorsell, editor of The Globe and Mail, who had been extremely supportive of Mulroney on Meech and other major initiatives, such as free trade. In the course of the conversation, Thorsell mentioned that The Globe would be launching a major redesign the following Tuesday, and he asked if the paper could have an exclusive interview the next day. In a state of both exhaustion and elation, Mulroney immediately agreed, without consulting his constitutional or communications advisers. The next morning at 24 Sussex, Mulroney met three senior Globe reporters—national affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson, Ottawa bureau chief Graham Fraser, and correspondent Susan Delacourt, who had strong reservations about Meech and strong objections to the constitutional process of eleven white guys in suits meeting behind closed doors. After some small talk with Mulroney in the backyard overlooking the Ottawa River, the three journalists were escorted into the prime minister’s study off the front hall of 24 Sussex. Mulroney was in a good mood. He was due to make a triumphal speech to the House of Commons that afternoon. June 11 was the seventh anniversary of his winning the Conservative leadership. It was also his daughter Caroline’s birthday. “Is that right?” Delacourt piped up as the interview was ending. “Mine, too.” “Is it?” Mulroney replied. “Congratulations.” Because Mulroney knew Fraser and Simpson quite well, he relaxed with them and spoke in an informal, jocular manner. Delacourt didn’t know him well at all, and she was taken aback by some of Mulroney’s colloquial banter. The interview lasted two hours, including interruptions for Mulroney to take one call from Don Getty and another from Clyde Wells, who informed him there would be a vote on Meech in the Newfoundland legislature, rather than a referendum. The interview transcript ran to fifty-two pages. But for Delacourt, one paragraph stood out. “I told them a month ago when we were going to start meeting,” Mulroney said he had told his top advisers. “It’s like an election date,” he told the reporters. “You’ve got to pick your dates and you work backward from it. And I said, that’s the day I’m going to roll all the dice. It’s the only way to handle it.” Fraser wasn’t hearing anything particularly enlightening. He had himself written in Playing for Keeps, his book on the 1988 campaign, that Mulroney had planned the free trade election in exactly that way. Delacourt, though, was hearing something new—that the timing of the meeting was as important as the substance of the discussions, that it had been delayed until the last possible moment to turn up the heat on the premiers.

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Anyone familiar with the way Mulroney talked in private would not have seen the quote as significant. In Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister, my early biography of him, the main chapter on the 1984 election was entitled “Campaign ’84: One Big Roll of the Dice.” This title came from an interview with Mulroney in which he explained why he had decided to give up his safe seat in Nova Scotia and risk everything on going home to run on the North Shore of Quebec. It was, he explained then, “one big roll of the dice.” But Delacourt wasn’t hearing about timing and tactics; she was hearing about the premiers being put in a pressure cooker and the country being subjected to the agony of a week-long meeting behind closed doors. The story, exploded off the front page of The Globe onto cbc’s The National and other network newscasts, taking on a life of its own. “It didn’t help,” Peterson later acknowledged. “It gave people like Wells and Filmon a pretext to get off the hook.” In Manitoba, Filmon used the interview as an excuse to drag his heels on ratification. When ndp backbencher Elijah Harper, a Cree chief, raised his voice and a symbolic feather to deny unanimous consent to introduce the Meech resolution without the requisite two days’ notice, Filmon refused to suspend the rules. “They chose to roll the dice, and now they’re reaping what they sowed,” he said as the clock ran down in his legislature. “The federal government, by the prime minister’s own admission,” Wells would declare on June 22, “chose to gamble with the constitutional future of this country and, in his words, ‘roll the dice,’ and do it in a way to manipulate the outcome.” While the Manitoba legislature began the final week of the Meech countdown, Wells flew to the seaside town of Mystic, Connecticut, for the annual Conference of Eastern Canadian Premiers and New England Governors. Normally a clambake and photo opportunity, the two-day meeting on June 18–19 was dominated by cross-border concerns about Meech. “Quite frankly,” Frank McKenna said at the time, “it’s downright embarrassing to come here and find this conference totally preoccupied by thoughts of Canada breaking up.” Arriving early for an evening reception on Sunday, June 17, Wells found himself chatting with Charles McMillan, formerly Mulroney’s senior policy adviser and then an economic consultant to the Atlantic premiers. The conversation turned to the impending vote on Meech. “He told me he wasn’t going to hold a vote,” McMillan would recall. Wells later maintained that anything he might have said to McMillan was consistent with what he told reporters attending the same reception—that a vote in Newfoundland’s legislature depended largely on whether one was held in Manitoba. “If it isn’t going to be consid-

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ered in Manitoba, it’s academic what happens in Newfoundland,” he told the media that evening. “So when I say we’ll have to consider it, that’s what we’ll look at.” It’s not as if Wells didn’t signal the endgame. Meeting journalists as the conference wrapped up on Tuesday, June 19, Bourassa called on Filmon to bring Meech to a vote and dismissed the possibility of extending the deadline by re-enacting the accord. “Do you believe,” he asked, “that in Quebec, after three solemn and emotional ceremonies saying, ‘We are so glad to see you back in the Canadian family,’ that now we’ll start another three years?” Bourassa scoffed at the prospect of more ceremonies saying, “Welcome back to Canada, dear Quebec.” “Do you think,” he asked, “that I will accept this as leader of Quebec?” In the final three days of the Meech countdown, the focus shifted from the procedural wrangle in Manitoba to the Newfoundland legislature, the house on the hill in St. John’s. Both Peterson and Mulroney, as well as McKenna and Grant Devine, agreed to fly to St. John’s and speak to the Newfoundland House of Assembly on the clear understanding with Wells that there would be a vote in the legislature on Meech. “What do you think I was doing there, as prime minister of Canada, speaking to his provincial legislature on the day before the vote was scheduled?” Mulroney asked many years later. “Of course, he promised there would be a vote.” “That’s correct, that was the clear undertaking,” Frank McKenna would recall. “I wouldn’t have gone there otherwise. None of us would have.” “Of course, it was on that basis. That’s the only reason we went there,” said Peterson. “It’s the only reason we subjected ourselves to this humiliation. It was all about Clyde’s vanity.” For his part, Wells later maintained that he never gave any such undertaking and that he had, at the June 9 signing ceremony, merely invited Mulroney and the premiers to Newfoundland. He later wrote that “the invitation was extended to all first ministers, and there is no indication whatsoever of any undertakings.” As they flew in from Toronto on Wednesday, June 20, Peterson’s principal secretary, Dan Gagnier said, “We had been assured there would be a vote.” But after Peterson’s speech to the House of Assembly, Gagnier had dinner with his counterpart, Edsel Bonnell, from Wells’s staff. “I came away with a feeling there wouldn’t be a vote,” Gagnier recalled. “I walked away with a bad feeling. The logic of the conversation led to the conclusion the vote would never be held. And I told David as much on the plane on the way home.” Mulroney flew in the next morning on his government Challenger,

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accompanied only by Lowell Murray. As they were wheels-up out of Ottawa, Mulroney started to make some notes for his eleventh-hour appeal to the Newfoundland legislature, which was generally remembered as one of the best presentations of his career because it was entirely his own and entirely unscripted. Recalled Murray: “I was present in the legislature, and Wells told Mulroney, ‘I don’t know how much good you did, but you won some support here today, and the vote will be tomorrow.’” Later in his own home, according to Mulroney, Wells repeated his promise that there would be a vote in the legislature. “We were sitting at his dinner table,” Mulroney said years later. “And we talked about the vote the next day.” Wells later would refer to a statement he issued in July 1990: “I did tell the prime minister that, while I could not be absolutely certain at this stage as to the outcome of the vote in Newfoundland, my belief was that it would be rejected.” “You can draw your own conclusions,” he wrote in reply to a query from the author, “as to the likelihood I would have made the later suggested promise to the prime minister . . . particularly when Newfoundland’s position that the vote should not proceed if the process were brought to an end in Manitoba was publicly stated in Mystic, Connecticut on June 17th, and debated publicly during the five days preceding June 22nd.” “Do you mean to tell me,” Bill Cameron of cbc’s The Journal asked in a July 4 interview, “that at dinner that night, before all of this happened, you didn’t tell the prime minister?” “I don’t remember, Bill, honestly,” Wells replied, “whether I spoke to the prime minister about it or not.” Mulroney was quite clear in his own recollection that not only did they discuss the vote over Wells’s dinner table, but afterwards on his balcony as the prime minister took his leave. John Crosbie had decamped to St. John’s for the week to oversee the federal strategy. The minister for International Trade and the federal patron of the Hibernia offshore oil project in Newfoundland, he detected a pronounced swing in favor of Meech. His sense was based not only on what he was hearing but what he was seeing from nightly federal polling of Newfoundland and Labrador. “We commissioned a poll which showed 42 percent of Newfoundlanders in favor of ratification, 42 percent opposed, and 16 percent undecided,” Crosbie wrote in his best-selling memoir No Holds Barred. “I sent the poll to Wells to show that Newfoundlanders were not overwhelmingly opposed to Meech Lake, as he had claimed.” From his first conversation with Wells to congratulate him following his election in 1989, John Crosbie had a bad feeling. “It was clear that he didn’t give a damn about the impact of his position on any other

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Newfoundland issues, such as Hibernia, in Ottawa,” Crosbie said later. “He was going to press forward with what he called his principled opposition to Meech, because for him the Constitution was something that was there for a thousand years. He was very opinionated and could not be persuaded. These were all views he had held for years. There was nothing you could do with him.” As the final week of the constitutional drama unfolded, the proMeech numbers moved up sharply in Newfoundland. “We continued polling each night,” Crosbie wrote, “and, as the week went on, public support for the accord climbed until it reached 47 to 37 for ratification.” In the legislature, Wells enjoyed only a modest majority of 30 seats to 22 for Tom Rideout’s Conservatives. Assuming the Tories were solidly pro-Meech in the promised free vote, it would take only a 5vote swing in the Liberal caucus to re-enact the accord that Wells had rescinded in April. With other prominent Newfoundlanders, including Craig Dobbin and Richard Cashin, mounting a concerted bipartisan effort, the proMeech forces were confident they had enough Liberal votes to pass it. “We had the votes,” Crosbie maintained in 2002. “We thought there were enough Liberals, at least five or six, ready to support it that Wells would have lost the vote, which is one of the reasons he cancelled the goddam thing.” “That may be,” Frank McKenna would observe. “But that doesn’t excuse not calling it. I just find it unconscionable that on an issue of such great importance, it wouldn’t be put to a vote.” In the legislature, no fewer than 48 out of 52 members spoke in the Meech debate, with 20 opposed, 18 in favor, and the others not tipping their hand. In the event, they were allowed to speak, but not to vote. On the evening of June 21, Wells bid farewell to his dinner guest, the prime minister, and returned to the legislature. “By then,” his constitutional adviser Deborah Coyne wrote in Roll of the Dice, “there had been at least three defections, including the cabinet minister responsible for conducting Chrétien’s campaign in Newfoundland, David Gilbert.” By his own head count, Wells later acknowledged that “three caucus members indicated to me that they intended to vote in favor of the accord.” The iceberg was moving. He returned home and called Gary Filmon in Winnipeg. Premier Filmon, Coyne wrote, “indicated it was a virtual certainty that the Manitoba legislature would adjourn on Friday at 12.30—3 p.m. Newfoundland time—because of the inability to get unanimous consent to proceed.” Wells also spoke to Manitoba Liberal leader Sharon Carstairs, and as Andrew Cohen recounted the conversation in A Deal Undone, “Carstairs advised Wells not to vote until he heard from Manitoba. She

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reassured him there would be no vote, and promised he would receive a call as soon as the legislature adjourned.” From then on, the suicide pact between Wells and Filmon was locked in. “They were in constant touch,” Frank McKenna recalled. “They both knew that neither one of them could hold out alone.” On the morning of June 22, Wells called Crosbie and expressed concern about the repercussions of a negative vote in the Newfoundland legislature after a no-vote in Manitoba. “About noon,” Coyne wrote, “Elijah Harper called Wells and told him that he was going to prevent the Manitoba legislature from proceeding, and that he was determined to prevent approval of the Accord. It was now clear that Meech would die in Manitoba at about 3 p.m. Newfoundland time.” What business would the premier of any province have with a member of the opposition in another province, and a renegade member of a third party at that? After talking to Harper, Wells had additional assurance that the suicide pact was on. All morning, he had been ragging the puck in his legislature, dealing with a local labor issue, resuming the debate on Meech—anything but calling the vote. After his conversation with Harper, Wells simply ran out the clock. Long afterwards, Mulroney would ask about Wells: “What kind of man invites the prime minister of Canada, not only to his legislature, but into his own home, and breaks his word?” Ironically, Wells would call Mulroney several weeks after the death of Meech to lobby for $2.7 billion in federal loan guarantees for the Hibernia offshore project— one of the very things Crosbie had been warning might be endangered by the demise of Meech. The federal Conservative caucus, especially the Quebec deputation, was in a mood to punish Wells, and Finance Minister Michael Wilson agreed. But Mulroney overruled them. “I was determined to do it for Newfoundland and for John Crosbie,” he said. “I owed John Crosbie big time.” In Newfoundland, Wells gravely intoned that inasmuch as the Manitoba legislature had adjourned without a vote, there was no need for one in his legislature. Later he maintained that had Meech been put to a vote, it would have been defeated, and he allowed that he himself would have voted against it. “What good would it do for us,” he asked in his legislature as he cancelled the vote, “in light of what happened in Manitoba, to hold up our fists and say to Quebec, ‘No! Never!’” Meech was dead. Wells then flew to Calgary to attend the Liberal leadership convention where, on the Saturday afternoon, he ran into Jean Chrétien. “Thanks for all your help, Clyde,” Chrétien said. “God bless you, Mr. Chrétien,” replied Wells, as the two men hugged in full view of the television cameras. In Quebec, this would

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become a mythic moment, alleged proof of their co-conspiracy to kill the Meech Lake Accord. Five years later, in the 1995 referendum campaign, when Quebec Liberal leader Daniel Johnson suggested that recognition of Quebec as a distinct society would be “desirable” for his struggling No campaign, Wells was one of the premiers canvassed for his reaction. Just his appearance on French-language television and his mincing comments in English helped push the Yes campaign’s overnight numbers over 50 percent, with only a week to go in the campaign. Even then, five years after the death of Meech, the wound hadn’t healed in Quebec. In 1996, Wells resigned the premiership of Newfoundland and was named by Prime Minister Chrétien to the provincial Court of Appeal. Three years later, Chrétien appointed him chief justice of Newfoundland and head of its appeal court. No one could ever again make light of his status as a constitutional jurist. Sharon Carstairs was appointed to the Senate in 1994. In 2001, Chrétien named her to cabinet as government leader in the Senate. As for Elijah Harper, he would be elected an mp for the federal Liberals in 1993, and after his defeat in the 1997 election, Chrétien would appoint him to the Indian Claims Commission. Deborah Coyne was appointed to the Immigration and Refugee Board by Chrétien the same year. In Quebec City, Bourassa was also watching the disastrous denouement of Meech in Winnipeg and St. John’s. “For the first few days after the conference, we were pretty confident, but then we could sense it was unraveling,” recalled John Parisella. “There was Mulroney’s ‘roll the dice’ interview, which served as a lightning rod. And by the following Tuesday, we started preparing for the alternative. It was a very different scenario.” Bourassa prepared for the alternative as he prepared for many important political events in his life—he went for a swim. During the day, there had been an important phone call to Parisella from Grégoire Gollin, the Liberal party pollster. “He called and said we had to do something about declaring the importance of the distinct society.” At five o’clock in the afternoon, Parisella jumped into the back seat of the premier’s limo and rode with Bourassa over to the Civil Service Club, where he swam every day he was in the Quebec capital. “Bottom line,” Parisella told him, “we have to find a way to declare Quebec a distinct society.” “I know what I have to do,” Bourassa replied. In the anteroom off the premier’s office in the Bunker, he had already been making notes with a felt pen, writing talking points on index cards. At one point, Ronald Poupart stuck his head through the door and asked if he need-

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ed any help. Bourassa, who was on the phone, waved him off. “I’m convinced he was on the phone with his wife, trying out his lines on her,” Poupart later said. “In a crisis, he always asked her opinion. To a degree of which people were never aware, Andrée Bourassa was his closest adviser.” Bourassa later said it was while he was swimming that the precise formulation of what would become his most famous sound bite came to him. “No matter what anyone says or does,” he told a hushed National Assembly that evening, “Quebec has always been, is now, and always will be a distinct society, free and capable of assuming its own destiny and development.” When he sat down, the legislature exploded with an ovation that bordered on bedlam. Opposition leader Parizeau, who called Bourassa “my premier,” crossed the floor to shake his hand. “He was l’homme d’État,” Lucien Bouchard observed in 2002. “He never had such approval as after that speech. He knew he could have opened the road to sovereignty after that.” Bouchard added of francophone Quebecers: “Everyone was united for the first time ever.” On Saturday, June 23, three years to the day from the ratification of Meech in the National Assembly, the Quebec legislature became the place where it was buried. Bourassa made a formal statement in the Salon Rouge, and then in a response to a question, he declared: “Don’t ask me to return to the table. Dignity would not permit it.” The death of Meech unleashed a chain of events in Quebec remarkably similar to the election of the pq in 1976. No one could foretell the next development, and no one could foresee the consequences. On June 25, after a one-day rain delay, half a million people marched in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade in Montreal, led by Lucien Bouchard and Jacques Parizeau. Robert Bourassa was nowhere to be seen. He had already decided on a strategy of getting out in front of the parade, in order to slow it down. Had Bourassa called a referendum on sovereignty in the summer or fall of 1990, there can be little doubt that he would have led Quebec to independence. In September 1990, a poll by Léger & Léger put support for sovereignty at 61 percent. In November, a crop survey measured it at 64 percent. Bourassa never had any intention of leading a referendum on sovereignty. “Sovereignty? I could do it tomorrow,” he told Poupart at the time. “But I don’t believe in it.” As Bouchard observed long afterwards, “If Bourassa had said, ‘On y va,’ it’s clear that it would have happened. It’s rare in the history of peoples that one voice does it, but in his case it’s clear that he could have done it.” But it was equally clear that Bourassa didn’t want to do it. “I’m profoundly convinced that

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federalism is in the best interest of Quebecers,” he told Poupart after the death of Meech. “But I’m going to have to navigate for a while.” While he was navigating, Bourassa was counting on Quebecers to cool off. “People have to calm down,” he told Poupart. “If they want independence, and they know the costs, advantages and disadvantages, that’s one thing. But it isn’t going to happen on a wave of emotion.” But Bourassa did commit in Bill 150 to conducting a referendum on sovereignty by October 26, 1992. That is why he so annoyed journalist Jean-François Lisée, author of the best-selling Le Tricheur, and why he was himself so annoyed by the writer’s presumptions in his book, published in English as The Trickster, that Bourassa deliberately deprived Quebecers of an appointment with destiny. His sense was that he had deprived Lisée, later a communications adviser and speechwriter for premiers Parizeau and Bouchard, of his own envisioned destiny. In his entire life in politics, Bourassa rarely took any criticism to heart, but Lisée’s book appeared as he was leaving public life in 1994, and he took it personally. Long-time associates had seldom seen him so angry. Long after Bourassa’s death in 1996, Lisée’s book remained a sensitive topic in Bourassa’s personal and extended political families. The constitutional guru Léon Dion had suggested that the only way to negotiate with English Canada was with “a knife at the throat.” Bourassa’s weapon of choice was a gun, and with Bill 150, he was putting a bullet in it. But even as he was waving the gun at the rest of the country, there was a risk he could point it at his own head. Over the summer of 1990, Bourassa began the process for what would become the Bélanger-Campeau Commission on Quebec’s constitutional future. Michel Bélanger, chairman of the National Bank of Canada, was the federalist co-chair. Jean Campeau, former head of the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, and later a cabinet minister under Jacques Parizeau, was the sovereignist co-chair. But by early July, before the co-chairs were even in place, Bourassa had signed up one panel member described by John Parisella as his “star recruit”— Lucien Bouchard. “He went after Bouchard,” said Poupart, because as he said, quoting Lyndon Johnson, “‘I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’” On vacation in the Charlevoix, Bouchard returned from a morning of mountain climbing and was told Premier Bourassa had been trying to reach him on the phone. The next thing he knew, Bouchard was sitting in Bourassa’s rooftop cabana at the Bunker, having lunch with the

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premier. “He was in very good humor,” Bouchard later recalled of their July 3 meeting. “He wanted to announce me as the first member of the Bélanger-Campeau Commission, even though Bélanger and Campeau hadn’t even been appointed yet.” There was no doubt in Bouchard’s mind that it was a maneuver on Bourassa’s part, to legitimize the dissident Quebec mps in Ottawa and to outflank Jacques Parizeau with the sovereignist constituency. The joining of Bourassa and Bouchard constituted a rapport de force, a term favored by both of them. Bourassa hadn’t even created the commission on Quebec’s political future, yet he was prepared to name Bouchard as its first member. Bouchard hadn’t even founded the Bloc Québécois, yet he was clearly influenced by Bourassa’s encouragement that he do so. Three weeks later, Bouchard announced the formation of the Bloc. Bourassa also decided to use the party’s noisy youth wing as shock troops for a gambit he called “neo-federalism.” Meeting at La Pocatière on August 11, more than a thousand Liberal youth endorsed a proposal calling for political autonomy for Quebec within a federal superstructure—sort of a sovereign Quebec in a united Canada. One of the youth leaders, Mario Dumont, also sat on the party’s constitutional committee, chaired by an obscure jurist named Jean Allaire, which was to make recommendations to a full-scale Liberal policy convention the following March. Bourassa would live to regret letting both these genies, Dumont and Allaire, out of the bottle. As for the climate of crisis, Bourassa later blamed “those who, between 1987 and 1990, torpedoed the Meech Lake Accord.” And he added, with an uncharacteristic note of harshness in a March 1991 speech to a Liberal convention: “History will judge them.” Who did he have in mind? Wells and Filmon, to be sure, but as he also reminded Mulroney, “Don’t forget that McKenna started it.” Most of all, Bourassa blamed Trudeau and questioned his motives. “I was stunned by the attitude of Mr. Trudeau, who was rather isolated,” Bourassa said in his final Jean Monnet lecture in 1995. “Was it that he couldn’t acknowledge that he was wrong in 1982?” in patriating the Constitution and entrenching the Charter without Quebec’s signature. “It’s fair to ask the question.” “After Meech, we would have had stability for a very long time,” suggested one of the professors participating in the round table at the Université de Montréal. “And the worst constitutional error in the history of this country is probably Mr. Trudeau’s campaign against Meech.” The professor’s name was Stéphane Dion; he would later serve in the Chrétien cabinet as minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and sponsor of the hardline Clarity Act.

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The fallout from the failure of Meech was all about the tactics and strategy of managed political events. But on July 11, 1990, there occurred an entirely unforeseen event that would dominate the news in Quebec, and Canada, for the remainder of the summer. It would push the constitutional consequences off the front pages and ultimately delay Bourassa’s medical treatment for a life-threatening cancer called melanoma, because, as his press secretary Sylvie Godin later said, “he refused to leave his post.” Native Affairs Minister John Ciaccia was at home in the Montreal suburb of Beaconsfield around 8 o’clock that morning when he got a call from the office. “It was my chief of staff,” Ciaccia recalled, “telling me the Sûrété du Québec had made a raid at Kanehsatake.” Kanehsatake was a Mohawk reserve near Oka, northwest of Montreal, where the native people had been attempting to block an extension of a local municipal golf course into a stand of pine trees that was an ancient aboriginal burial ground. The Mohawk protesters had peacefully erected a barricade on a side road leading to the forest. “It was hallowed ground,” said Ciaccia, who doubled as minister of International Relations in the Bourassa cabinet. He had recently intervened with Ottawa, where he tried to persuade Indian Affairs Minister Tom Siddon to buy the land from the town and give it to the Mohawks. But Siddon was as inscrutable as he was noncommittal. Ciaccia was an old hand at aboriginal issues. In the backyard of his waterfront home on Lac Saint-Louis stood a totem pole presented to him by a British Columbia tribe when he had been assistant deputy minister of Indian Affairs under Jean Chrétien in Ottawa. Recruited by Bourassa for the Montreal riding of Mount Royal in the 1973 election, Ciaccia was shunted to the backbench, but completed one important assignment for the premier—the successful negotiation of the historic 1975 James Bay Treaty between the government and the Cree of northern Quebec. The agreement settled aboriginal land claims for $225 million and ultimately enabled the creation of native enterprises, such as Air Creebec, in return for the Cree dropping their lawsuits against the James Bay hydroelectric development. More than a quarter-century later, in October 2001, when the Grand Council of the Cree agreed to a $3.5 billion compensation package over fifty years, in return for their consent to further hydro development of the north, the accord was modeled on the deal negotiated by Ciaccia. Ciaccia’s lakefront property had once been a trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company. “The Indians used to come here and trade furs,” he said. “There’s a well in front of the house that dates from the original property, and they found arrowheads at the bottom of it.”

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On June 29, the town of Oka had obtained an injunction in Quebec Superior Court ordering the Mohawks to remove their barricades. On July 11, the sq decided to enforce the injunction in a dawn raid, apparently without informing Sam Elkas, the minister for Public Security. He thus had no opportunity to consult Ciaccia. The Mohawks regarded the police raid as a provocation. Gunfire was exchanged, and a sq corporal, Marcel Lemay, was killed. For Ciaccia and for Quebec, it was the beginning of the Oka Crisis, seventy-six days of continuous civil disobedience and civil strife that would bruise Quebec’s reputation as a tolerant society, one that prided itself as a model of harmonious relations with its aboriginal peoples. In that morning, the protest site became a crime scene. Behind the barricades, it also became an armed camp. By sunset that day, the Mohawks of neighboring Kahnawake had blockaded the Mercier Bridge. Thousands of commuters from Châteauguay and other suburbs couldn’t get to and from work. For nearly two months, their only way into the city was to drive down to Highway 15 and into Montreal over the already congested Champlain Bridge. It would take them three to four hours just to get to work. At one point, angry residents rioted on a road leading to the bridge, hurling invective at the Mohawks and rocks at the police. The image was one of white trash run amok, and it was transmitted around the world. cnn sent the Reverend Jesse Jackson to do his weekly show on minority issues out of Montreal. “The images,” as John Parisella later observed, “were devastating.” The premier’s office was already in what he termed “crisis management mode” over the death of Meech, and now it had a real, rather than apprehended, crisis on its hands. “To be honest, I don’t think we had an idea of what we were getting into,” Parisella would say many years later. “We were getting into a major crisis, one with international ramifications.” The Mohawk protesters had been infiltrated and their cause hijacked by a group of thugs known as the Warriors, many from the United States and all of them heavily armed. At one point, Parisella said, “we were told they had rocket launchers that could reach downtown Montreal.” At another moment, Ciaccia was told the Warriors had weapons “that could penetrate army personnel carriers.” One reporter, Bernard St. Laurent, later recalled being waved off by a teenaged sentry “carrying an ak-47.” For Parisella, it was always “a public security crisis.” For Ciaccia, it was essentially a crisis of conscience. Openly sympathetic to the Mohawk cause, he tried to carry their arguments to the premier’s office and to the cabinet table. His son even built a temporary dock at a waterfront apartment building Ciaccia owned in Dorval, where food

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and medical supplies were shunted across Lac Saint-Louis to Kahnawake. The return cargo included golf clubs belonging to members of the famed Kanawake Golf Club, built on land leased for generations from the Mohawks. “Was John out of control?” Parisella wondered many year later. “He led with his heart, rather than his head. He was trying to change a lot of the Indian heritage for the better in the midst of a public security crisis. He led with his heart. Bourassa led with his head.” For Ciaccia, there was never any sense that he had lost Bourassa’s confidence. “He never told me to close down the dock at my apartment building,” Ciaccia said. “He did say to me, ‘John, you and your damn dock,’ but that’s as far as he went.” For Bourassa, Oka was one more crisis that he didn’t need on his plate, at a time of a closely held and deeply worrisome secret over his health. In early August, he was diagnosed with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer. Bourassa’s illness gave new urgency to settling the Oka Crisis. As Parisella later put it: “We had a premier who was fighting a life-threatening cancer.” In Ottawa, Prime Minister Mulroney named Alan B. Gold, chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court and a renowned labor negotiator, to mediate the crisis. In the early hours of Sunday, August 12, Gold thought he had reached an agreement to begin negotiations. At that point, all he wanted to achieve was to get the parties to the table. A signing ceremony was even arranged for Sunday afternoon with Gold and Siddon and Ciaccia representing their governments. But the Mohawks and the Warriors blindsided them by staging it behind the barricades, in front of armed and masked Warriors. It was the worst moment of the crisis—the legislative and judicial branches of government were, to all appearances, held hostage by a gang of thugs. “I was definitely told the signing would be at the barricades, on the Quebec side of the barricades, if I could put it that way, rather than the Kanehsatake side,” Ciaccia would recall. “That’s why I went.” For Bourassa, that was enough. For weeks, he had been considering calling in the army. And on August 17, for the second time in his career, he asked Ottawa to send in the Canadian armed forces to relieve the sq. Claude Ryan had predicted as much weeks earlier in a cabinet conversation that Ciaccia recounted in his 2000 memoir, The Oka Crisis. “He talks negotiations,” Ryan said, “but behind the scenes he’s made arrangements for the army.” The arrival of the army was a stinging rebuke to the sq and an echo of the October Crisis of 1970—except that Bourassa was twenty years older, and very much in command. He was determined that the

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Mercier Bridge would be reopened by the end of Labour Day weekend and the resumption of heavy rush-hour traffic into Montreal. And on September 5 it was. The final resolution of the Kanehsatake standoff would not come until September 26. And in Ottawa, the chief of defence staff, General John de Chastelain, knew that the colder nights would eventually drive the Warriors out of the forest. Their surrender was a matter of time and saving face. With the lifting of the siege at Kahnawake, Bourassa knew the worst was behind him, and that he could finally fly to Washington to receive radical treatments for his cancer at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. John Parisella always regarded the management of the Oka Crisis and the premier’s refusal to abandon his post for medical reasons as “one of Bourassa’s shining moments.” Bourassa’s take on it was rather less heroic. “There were no heroes,” he said. “But most of all, there were no martyrs.”

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Epilogue

Every New Year’s Eve, millions of Quebecers spent the last hour of the year watching television—not just any show but an annual year-end comedy special called Bye Bye, renowned for its cutting-edge writing, impersonations, and sketches of Quebec politicians and pop stars. For decades, the star of the show had been Dominique Michel, the diminutive and dynamic comedienne and chanteuse who was Quebec’s answer to Carol Burnett. In his time, Robert Bourassa had been good to the writers and performers of Bye Bye, providing them with many moments of high and low comedy during the 1970s and 1980s. But in 1990, Do-Do Michel called a touching truce. “Mr. Bourassa,” she said as the stars of the show gathered for the countdown to midnight, “on behalf of the entire cast, our best wishes for a prompt and full recovery.” The live audience at Radio-Canada interrupted with applause. “Mr. Bourassa, come back en pleine forme,” she continued. “Mr. Bourassa, we missed you this year.” She quickly completed her double entendre. “But you can be sure, that next year, on vous manquera pas—we won’t miss you.” From that moment, Bourassa ceased to be a controversial figure and became, in fact as well as in name, premier of all Quebecers. Recuperating from his cancer treatments at his family’s condo apartment in Bal Harbour, Florida, he was “deeply touched,” according to his close associate, Ronald Poupart. “Someone sent him the tape,” Poupart would recall. “He was very moved.” In his third term as premier, he had finally won the esteem of Quebecers, as a leader who put their interests first. As Poupart later

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commented, “With Robert Bourassa, it was l’état avant tout.” In his fourth term, he had finally won their affection, as a leader who put the state before himself, including his own health. At the end of 1990, Quebecers were well aware that Bourassa had stayed at his post through the worst of the Oka Crisis, at significant personal risk. By the beginning of 1991, they wanted him back at his post, at a minimum of personal risk. In Washington, beginning in September, Bourassa had been receiving experimental treatments for his melanoma under the care of Dr. Michael Rosenberg, who had successfully treated President Ronald Reagan’s skin cancer, though one detected much earlier. By year’s end, while Bourassa’s prognosis remained guarded, it was hopeful. But by then, he had been away from the premier’s office for four months, and while he had remained in touch virtually on a daily basis, there was clearly a vacuum of leadership in the government and, more to the point, in the Liberal party. In the post-Meech context, two trains were running on parallel tracks: the Bélanger-Campeau Commission in the National Assembly and the Liberal party’s constitutional committee chaired by Jean Allaire. By year’s end, one of them, the Allaire committee, was threatening to become a runaway train. When Bourassa was informed of Allaire’s draft recommendations over the Christmas holidays, he was taken aback by the sovereignist thrust. “What they were proposing to me was sovereignty for Quebec,” he recalled in 1995, in the last of his lectures for Gouverner le Québec. “I had no mandate to implement this proposal and it seemed to me unrealistic and irresponsible for the premier of Quebec to announce, at the next party convention, without any other form of consultation, that the government had decided to propose the sovereignty of Quebec as its program.” “He was profoundly upset,” Ronald Poupart said more than a decade later. “He figured the people around him knew better.” They had allowed the Allaire process to get out of control. “There was literally an absence of leadership,” Poupart noted. In the premier’s absence, he added, “there was no one there to keep an eye on it.” “When he got sick,” Jean Charest would later observe, “in that period of his life, things got out of control.” Bourassa sent Allaire back to the drawing board “to eliminate this proposal for sovereignty, which seemed to me, at the very least, an incalculable risk and potentially destabilizing for Quebec.” But the result a month later, on January 29, was the Allaire report, which Bourassa called “a difficult and laborious compromise” that essentially proposed gutting the federal government and Quebec assuming most of Ottawa’s powers and prerogatives. As he put it, in one of the more

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ironic understatements of his career, “Obviously, this report was not accepted by my colleagues in the other Canadian provinces.” To say nothing of the federal government. Ottawa was committed to a process of reform, “not to a fire sale,” Prime Minister Mulroney told an audience at the Chambre de Commerce de Québec at the Château Frontenac on February 13. “You can’t have a part-time country,” he declared. The headline in La Presse perfectly summarized his message: “Pas de pays à temps partiel.” And the editorial cartoon in Le Soleil summed up the prime minister’s frigid reception: “Thanks for your warm welcome,” said a caricature of a freezing Mulroney, with condensation for breath. Nor was the Allaire report really accepted by Bourassa. But before he could put it on the shelf, he had to get past a divisive Liberal policy convention on the weekend of March 8–10 with, as he noted, “its potential for schism.” The weekend gathering at Montreal’s Palais des Congrès marked Bourassa’s first public appearance in six months, and the 3,000 delegates greeted him with a prolonged standing ovation. The convention took its theme from his celebrated statement on the death of Meech, about “a Quebec free to choose.” It was his occasion, framed by his words. But for all that, he was not in control of the convention. The danger of a political fissure was real enough, with Allaire and Dumont, the nationalists and the youth, threatening to walk out if their report wasn’t adopted, and moderate nationalists such as Claude Ryan threatening to leave the floor if it was without a full debate. Bourassa tried to give comfort to both factions. His opening address on the Friday was more sovereignist than it should have been, and as a result, his closing address on the Sunday was more federalist than it would have been. He was indeed navigating the shoals in the waters of his own party. “We have a rendez-vous with the history of Quebec,” Bourassa declared in his keynote speech, adding that Quebecers had “a deep-seated will for political autonomy.” If eventual talks with the rest of Canada failed, he warned, “Quebecers will seek sovereignty, within a confederal structure.” But by the time of his closing address on the Sunday, he was tacking back to his federalist position. “The first choice of Quebecers,” he said, “is to develop inside Canada, in a federal structure.” And he called Canada “one of the most envied countries in the world.” Jean Charest later said that he understood what Bourassa was trying to achieve. “From his point of view,” observed Charest, “he was trying to let a lot of steam out of the kettle.” Switching metaphors, Charest suggested that Bourassa may have got more than he bargained for. “He was fishing with a five-pound test for a while, with a forty-

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pound salmon on the end.” While the cracks were papered over at the convention, both Allaire and Dumont later left the Liberal party. The Liberal convention was a watershed event for Bourassa. Not only did it mark the resumption of his public role; it marked the return of a man who had been touched by illness. As he later told John Parisella, “The first thing I do now in the morning is look to see if there are any more spots.” In that sense, Parisella thought he was working for a man who had been changed in subtle but profound ways by his illness. “The Bourassa before his illness was a man to test the winds and manage the moods,” he said a decade later. “I saw a different Bourassa after his illness.” For one thing, Parisella sensed that there would be no referendum on sovereignty, notwithstanding the Allaire report, the Bélanger-Campeau Commission, or the provisions of Bill 150, which were passed later in 1991. He was also convinced that Bourassa wanted a positive resolution of the language issue that had marked—and to some extent, marred—his career. “He said to me at the time of Bill 178,” Parisella would recall, “that he would not renew the notwithstanding clause” when it expired five years later. When the time came, near the end of his tenure in 1993, Bourassa brushed off the objections of militant students and trade unions, and adopted the more generous Bill 86, which would come to be regarded by all factions as the benchmark for linguistic peace in Quebec, permitting bilingual signs provided French was more prominent. In a trademark gambit, Bourassa simply outmaneuvered the students and unions by presenting the new language legislation six months before the expiration of the five-year notwithstanding clause and Bill 178. It was springtime, the month of May, and Quebec’s university students were in exams or had scattered for the summer vacation, and they had better things to do than take to the streets on the language issue. As well, the three big public service unions were in the middle of contract negotiations with the government and had to make a choice between “a language battle or a battle over new collective agreements,” as he noted with characteristic irony in 1995. “They decided to give priority to the second dossier.” No one knew the ebb and flow of Quebec politics, including its seasonal variations, as well as Bourassa did. Ronald Poupart also saw a different texture and tone in a man he had known for a quarter of a century, since they had been young Liberal candidates together in the 1966 election in adjoining east Montreal ridings, “Robert in Mercier and me in Sainte-Marie,” as Poupart recalled. By 1991, Poupart had moved from the premier’s office as press secretary to the cabinet room, where he was one of two senior

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deputy ministers to sit behind Bourassa at cabinet meetings. “I found the Robert Bourassa I knew after his illness to be much more serene,” he would later observe. “Serene in the sense that nothing frightened or preoccupied him any more.” Cabinet meetings, said Poupart, who sat in on them all, “seldom lasted more than an hour.” Bourassa always had an instinctive sense of the issues, had long since mastered the process, and rarely needed to call for a consensus. He seldom bothered to read his cabinet documents because, as he told Poupart: “You’re paid to read those things for me.” For Bourassa, Poupart noted, “it was more important to read The Economist or Le Monde, but then he also read Le Canard Enchaîné.” Bourassa regarded The Economist as “the best magazine in the world.” Le Monde gave him insights into the thinking of the French establishment in Paris. And Le Canard Enchaîné, the magazine which mercilessly lampooned that establishment, allowed him, as Poupart said, “to find new sources of humor.” Bourassa always found that, through political humor, he could measure the mood of the voters, and that it gave him a weapon in the political wars. With the possible exception of the pq’s Claude Charron, he was the most impressive parliamentarian of his generation. In his first term as an opposition backbencher after the 1966 election, he had learned from Daniel Johnson père that humor is a formidable weapon in parliamentary theatre. “It was Johnson who taught me parliament during those opposition years,” Bourassa would tell Poupart years later. “He was redoubtable.” “Bourassa had a lot of finesse and complete mastery of his emotions,” Lucien Bouchard observed in 2002. “He was like a spectator watching himself. He loved the game, and he liked people who played it well.” One of the people he liked was Bouchard, whom he often urged to get in the game. “He would call me when I was in Paris,” Bouchard said, “and tell me, ‘You’ve got to run,’ that it would help with Meech and free trade.” Bourassa campaigned for Bouchard in the 1988 LacSaint-Jean federal by-election and put the Liberal machine to work for him on the ground. And on more than one occasion after Jean Charest’s impressive showing in the 1995 referendum, Bourassa urged him to leave the federal Conservative leadership and accept an eventual draft to succeed Daniel Johnson. In question period, Bourassa had no equal in the arts of evasion and obfuscation, or the humorous rejoinder that would puncture the indignation of the opposition. After Jacques Parizeau returned to the legislature as pq leader following Pierre Marc Johnson’s abrupt resignation in 1987, his seat as opposition leader was directly in front of party

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whip Jacques Brassard, a strong Johnson loyalist. When Parizeau asked his first question in the National Assembly, Bourassa defused it with humor, saying he wanted to congratulate the leader of the opposition for his courage in sitting with his back to the member from LacSaint-Jean. Both sides of the legislature erupted with laughter. Bourassa was also the master of the quick put-down. “Ah, Bernard Landry,” he used to say of an eventual successor as premier, “always brilliant, sometimes intelligent.” “When Bourassa was premier, question period was entertaining, as opposed to being tedious under other premiers,” observed Bernard St. Laurent, who spent more than a decade as a parliamentary correspondent, including a term as president of the Quebec Press Gallery. “With one or two sentences, he could destroy the opposition and create havoc, and do it in a way that had everyone laughing. Charron was the better orator. But Bourassa had no equal in question period. It got to the point that the pq would avoid asking him questions.” In his entire parliamentary career, Bourassa spent only one week in the legislature as leader of the opposition, and it provided a telling glimpse of how much fun he might have had in the role. On June 14, 1985, following his victory in the Bertrand by-election, he took his seat in the National Assembly. The galleries were full and buzzing with anticipation about his first question. René Lévesque had probably been briefed for every question except the one Bourassa asked, about Quebec’s position on free trade, an issue that was then still below the radar. It would be another three months before Donald Macdonald even tabled the report of his Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada. Lévesque was speechless. The legislature fell into a stunned silence. Bourassa had shown them, in one question, how effective he would have been in both the tactics and the strategy of opposition. “For the moment, to be sure,” Lévesque stammered, “the government has not pretended, except sectorally, to have a complete policy.” A wave of murmurs and laughter swept the Salon Bleu. Lévesque then allowed there was “food for thought” in Bourassa’s question, which he called “really stimulating.” “The premier’s reply,” Bourassa countered, “is less than stimulating.” But later, on the last day of the spring session in the National Assembly, the public saw the gracious and generous side of Bourassa, as he congratulated Lévesque on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first election to the house, along with Jean Lesage, in 1960. After Lévesque left office, Pierre Marc Johnson provided him with a car and a driver, a courtesy that was due to expire after a year, when Bourassa renewed it.

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“But they left you in the street,” protested Poupart, who reminded Bourassa that he had been forced to hitch a ride to Montreal with an aide following his defeat in 1976. “Yes, but I’ve created a precedent,” Bourassa pointed out, with a twinkle in his eye. And indeed he had. Upon becoming premier in January 1996, Lucien Bouchard, in one of his first acts, renewed former premier Bourassa’s use of a government car and a driver from the Sûreté du Québec. When Lévesque died suddenly in November 1987, Bourassa intervened and assured his widow, Corinne Côté-Lévesque, that a state funeral would be conducted with a maximum of dignity and a minimum of ceremony. And when Lévesque’s funeral cortège left the National Assembly for the last time, en route to the Basilique NotreDame de Québec, Bourassa and Prime Minister Mulroney led an impressive parade of political personalities who walked behind it. It was one of those majestic moments of state where Bourassa’s sense of occasion and his innate class, served him and Quebec well. One of the dignitaries walking behind Bourassa that day was Canada’s ambassador to France, Lucien Bouchard, who happened to be in Ottawa on business when Lévesque died. At the lying-in-state at the National Assembly, Bouchard recalled that “Bourassa took me aside, and said, ‘You know, Quebecers loved René, and I admired him.’” Bouchard was struck then, as he often had been, by the contrasts between the public and private personalities of Lévesque and Bourassa. “When you met Lévesque,” he said, “it was a completely contrary impression to Bourassa. I was always intimidated by Lévesque in private. He was glacial—perhaps it was his own shyness, not at all like the charismatic figure the public saw. In public, Bourassa could be boring, the side of him that was the accountant in glasses. In private, he was charming, fascinating. He had a grande culture—political culture and historical culture.” Bouchard recalled that Bourassa once accepted a last-minute invitation to attend a private reception and dinner for the staff of the Cliche Commission after receiving the report of the landmark inquiry in 1975. “He came to the Château Frontenac and stayed for dinner,” recalled Bouchard, who was then chief counsel to the commission on violence and corruption in the construction industry. “He didn’t have to do that. The commission had given him a lot of bad publicity, and the report was very critical of his government. But he came anyway and thanked everyone individually for their good work on behalf of Quebec.” Bouchard was not alone in observing that, among Bourassa’s attributes as a public figure, “he had a tendency to be a bit Machiavellian.” But Bouchard also perceived that “his principal quality was that he

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felt very responsible for Quebecers. He had a very strong sense of duty, and of the responsibility of his office. He had a strong sense of the institution.” With the Liberal policy convention behind him, Bourassa had another hurdle to clear—the report of the Bélanger-Campeau Commission two weeks later, on March 26. Unlike his Allaire experience, Bourassa was able to manipulate Bélanger-Campeau to the desired outcome, a recommendation of a referendum on either sovereignty or new offers from the rest of Canada. And with the passage of Bill 150 in June, he was essentially committed to standing firmly at a fork in the road. Eventually, he was counting on getting a ride from the feds with “new offers” of renewed federalism, the alternative being to set out down the path to sovereignty, which Bourassa saw as a dead end. But there was an inherent contradiction in his strategy. He was counting on receiving offers from what he called “the table of eleven,” a table at which he now refused to sit. An empty chair does not talk, much less negotiate. Bourassa would indicate only that his bottom line in any new constitutional initiative was “the essence of Meech.” The problem was to bridge the constitutional divide between a Quebec and a Canada round, without derailing the train in the process. What had begun in 1986 as a discussion of a five-point Quebec agenda had expanded by 1991 to include a Triple-E Senate and aboriginal selfgovernment, all as the sine qua non of any new federal-provincial agreement. On his annual trip to the Davos conference early in 1992, Bourassa stopped over in Brussels for a meeting with Jacques Delors, then head of the European Commission. But just as he had mused from Europe about a constitutional superstructure in 1990, he made headlines at a meeting with European parliamentarians on February 6, when he speculated on the text of a referendum question. Overnight, it became known as the “Brussels question”: “Do you want to replace the present constitutional system with two sovereign states associated in an economic union, and responsible to an elected parliament?” He had suggested it as a more compact hypothetical question on sovereigntyassociation in the 1980 referendum. But with Bill 150 looming large, it was no longer just a hypothetical question. “I thought at least he would have asked the Brussels question,” Lucien Bouchard reflected a decade later. Bouchard thought “it would have passed like a bullet” in 1992. For that matter, he thought “it would have passed in 1995.” Said Bouchard: “I thought he would do it. Parizeau thought not, and it’s clear he was right about that. As far as he was concerned, it was just a maneuver.”

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And it was. Bourassa didn’t want to ask the Brussels question; he wanted to ask a question on renewed offers, and for that, he needed to get back to the “table of eleven,” the one that “dignity would not permit” him to sit at after the death of Meech. “The trick,” as Bob Rae wrote in From Protest to Power, “was to keep working on the Constitution without talking about it.” It turned out that Bourassa had a friend in Rae, the ndp premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Rae had defeated David Peterson in the snap election of September 6, 1990, partly because the Liberal incumbent had drunk from the poisoned chalice of Meech. As reluctant as he was to re-engage on the Constitution, Rae soon realized that as premier of Ontario he had no choice. Ontario was the honest broker of Confederation. That was his role, and he was expected to play it. He met Bourassa privately in Florida over the Christmas holidays in early January 1991 and then again at his Montreal office in June. The Quebec-Ontario relationship was restored, though Rae made it quite clear that Ottawa was not the bargaining agent for his province, and that Bourassa would eventually have to come back to the table. “Inclusiveness” and “empowerment” were the big buzzwords of communications gurus at the beginning of the 1990s, and Canada appeared to be the home of both. In addition to the Bélanger-Campeau process in Quebec and a select committee of the Ontario legislature, there was the federal Citizens’ Forum led by Keith Spicer, followed by the joint Senate-Commons committee co-chaired by Gérald Beaudoin and Dorothy Dobbie, and finally Joe Clark’s road show over the winter of 1992 to sell Ottawa’s new constitutional package, “Shaping Canada’s Future Together,” released in September 1991. But eventually, all this talk led back to the middle-aged white guys in suits—the federal government and the provincial premiers, now joined by the territorial and aboriginal leaders, northern and native middle-aged guys, minus the Quebec guy. And their talks were leading nowhere fast when, on July 7 in Ottawa, Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark produced what appeared to be a breakthrough agreement that included the elements of the distinct society, native self-rule, and a Triple-E Senate—elected, effective, and equal. “I then took that out of the room and called Bourassa,” Clark would recall a decade later, “and he said it would be very significant that Quebec would retain 25 percent of the seats in the Commons in perpetuity, that he would want to consult his cabinet and his advisers, but that the 25 percent guarantee in the House of Commons was very interesting. What I thought he said was that it would be a difficult sell, but the 25 percent would make it easier. I told him that I had to go back to

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the meeting, and that I needed an answer from him, and he said there was a basis for a deal.” Clark concluded: “I knew that he understood my question, and he knew that I understood his answer.” But there was a problem. Though they spoke in English, Clark may not have fully appreciated the nuances of Bourassa’s conversational style. If he said there was a basis for a deal, that didn’t mean there was a deal. Clark wasn’t the first to hear Bourassa say yes, when what he said, in the vernacular of “Bouspeak,” was maybe. “They heard a little more than he was saying,” Parisella later surmised. “But he needed to get back to the table.” In Munich to attend a G7 meeting, Mulroney was awakened well after midnight to be informed there was an agreement back in Ottawa, and that Bourassa was apparently on board for a Triple-E Senate. Not only was the prime minister incredulous; he was incensed. Incredulous that Bourassa would buy into a Triple-E Senate, meaning under-representation of Quebec in the upper house. And incensed that a deal had been done in his absence. Out of the country and out of the loop, Mulroney had been presented “with what looked like a backroom deal without me being aware of it.” There was also the real danger that Clark had concluded a deal which, if rejected by Bourassa, would have the unintended effect of leaving Quebec isolated again, as well as the political consequence of splitting the federal cabinet between its English- and French-speaking members. On his arrival back in Ottawa, Mulroney’s first job was to hold his cabinet together, including Clark, who would almost certainly have resigned if the prime minister had vetoed the accord. Mulroney’s second task was to bring Bourassa back to the table, where the Clark deal could be fine-tuned. “The July 7 accord was disappointing, but it seemed to me that it was capable of being improved,” Bourassa insisted in his final lecture as holder of the Jean Monnet chair in 1995. As everyone knew, he needed to return to the table, if only to receive the much anticipated offers that could pre-empt Bill 150’s provisions for a referendum on sovereignty by October 26. He finally joined the premiers for a seven-hour lunch at the prime minister’s country residence, Harrington Lake, on August 4, and for a second meeting there six days later. Further marathon sessions in Ottawa resulted in what Bourassa termed “the equivalent” of Meech, and they led to the signing of the Charlottetown Accord on August 28. The package would be put to the people in a referendum conducted in Quebec and across Canada on October 26. “The question should be short, direct, blunt, and unequivocal,” Bob Rae declared at Charlottetown. In this, he was supported by Mulroney and Bourassa, as the three of them overruled the recommendations of

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advisers who had researched referendums in Canada and other countries. “They wouldn’t let us enumerate the terms of the agreement,” Segal said a decade later, “when all the research said the more you enumerate the terms, the higher the support.” In other words, if you wanted a Triple-E Senate, you would have to take Quebec’s distinct society and aboriginal self-government along with it. Charlottetown had been called a smorgasbord, but Segal and the communications advisers wanted to package it as a Chinese meal with no substitutes. If you wanted the chicken chow mein, you had to take the noodles and fried rice. Bourassa understood the advice, but, said Parisella, he “wanted a short question rather than a shopping list. The Quebec experience with a long question in 1980 was that the issue could be framed in the campaign as simply ‘Do you want to stay in Canada, yes or no?’” The Charlottetown question was indeed simple: “Do you agree that the Constitution of Canada should be amended on the basis of the agreement reached on August 28, 1992?” One referendum would be conducted by Quebec and another by the feds in the rest of Canada. “The question had to be the same,” Segal recalled, and as always, the negotiations with Quebec went down to the wire. Finally, Segal told Parisella: “John, it’s going to the House of Commons at two o’clock. You’ve got to give us an answer.” On September 8, the National Assembly amended Bill 150 so that, as Bourassa later wrote, “the referendum of October 26 would be conducted on the Charlottetown Accord rather than sovereignty.” The gun was no longer loaded. In the Charlottetown Accord, Bourassa indeed obtained “the essence of Meech,” as well as what he called a “lifetime guarantee” that Quebec would retain its 25 percent of seats in the House of Commons in perpetuity, in spite of its share of the population having fallen below that and being projected to go even lower. And he had obtained a wrinkle on the Triple-E Senate, in that each province’s six senators could be elected by either the voters or the legislature—in Quebec’s case, the National Assembly. Furthermore, the Charlottetown Accord stipulated that “bills affecting the French language and culture require a majority of francophone senators,” giving Quebec an effective veto. But in the referendum campaign, Bourassa was hobbled by the perception that he had been écrasé, that he had “collapsed” or “caved” at Charlottetown, as his deputy minister for Intergovernmental Affairs, Diane Wilhelmy, put it in an incredibly indiscreet cellphone conversation with another adviser, André Tremblay, on the very night the Charlottetown Accord was signed. Wilhelmy and Tremblay, two of Bourassa’s most senior constitutional advisers, agreed he had not

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sufficiently defended the traditional demands of Quebec. The unsecured call was taped, leaked to a radio station, and broadcast across Quebec. The écrasé comment framed the discussion at the outset, created reverse momentum, and put Bourassa on the defensive throughout the campaign. “That really screwed us,” Parisella said. Bourassa found it “quite shocking” that two of his closest advisers should be having such a conversation, even on a secure line. A mortified Wilhelmy sent him a handwritten note of apology, to which Parisella said the premier never replied. “He really resented that, and was much less magnanimous than he was inclined to be in other cases,” Parisella said. “He was quite confident afterwards, and told me more than once that Charlottetown would stand the test of time, in terms of the gains that were there for Quebec and for aboriginal peoples.” Nor was he helped by a statement by Moe Sihota, the B.C. minister of Constitutional Affairs, that the Quebec premier had “hit a wall” at Charlottetown and that the accord conferred no special status on Quebec, reinforcing the impression that he had “collapsed.” Charlottetown may well have been a train carrying excess constitutional cargo. “It was that weight,” Clark would later suggest, “that ultimately brought it down.” It certainly produced an odd coalition of negatives, one that saw Pierre Trudeau campaigning on the same side as Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard making common cause with Preston Manning. In English-speaking Canada, the Reform leader tapped into the prime minister’s unpopularity by campaigning against “the Mulroney deal.” Though it was a rough campaign, Bourassa played it out to the end. “I saw him in Fleurimont, where we did a meeting together,” Jean Charest recalled. “It wasn’t going well, but I was impressed by his composure.” “In a referendum there are no winners and no losers,” Bourassa said on October 26, as the Yes option went down to defeat by 56.6 percent in Quebec and 55 percent across Canada. There is only, he added, the sovereign voice of the people. Like Mulroney, Bourassa was much less troubled by the defeat of Charlottetown at the polls than the death of Meech in two legislatures. “It was a healthy experience for the voters,” Mulroney insisted many years later. “No one has the right to complain about a defeat in a referendum. The only thing you can object to is when a vote is not allowed, either in a referendum or a legislature, on proposed constitutional amendments.” Then there was the question of Bourassa’s Bill 150 and what Mulroney’s chief of staff, Hugh Segal, called “taking the bullet out of the chamber.” As Segal later maintained: “Whether we won or lost was

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interesting but not fundamental. Charlottetown was very much about getting the bullet out of the chamber.” Or as Mulroney later put it, “There was that referendum thing he had got himself into, and Charlottetown got him off the hook.” In July 1993, Ronald Poupart asked for a rare formal meeting with Bourassa at the premier’s seventeenth-floor office in the Hydro-Québec building in Montreal. “Since when do you need to ask for a meeting with me?” Bourassa responded to his long-time friend and associate. “Robert,” Poupart began, “I want to know if you’re running again.” “No,” Bourassa replied. “C’est fini.” Bourassa’s answer hung in the air for a moment. “Why do you ask?” “Because I’m not sure that Daniel Johnson is the guy to lead us.” “Ronald,” Bourassa replied, “there’s nothing to be done. I have to leave.” “We can have a good leadership race,” Poupart suggested. “I’d rather not,” Bourassa said. He detested confrontation, especially in the Liberal party, and said he would rather avoid the family quarrel of a contested leadership campaign. His successor would be Daniel Johnson, who had served him loyally as president of the Treasury Board, and who had emerged as the consensus candidate to succeed him. For himself, Bourassa had long since determined that his fourth term of office would be his last. “His decision was taken long before that,” Poupart said. “The first indication I had was on a plane to Senegal.” In May 1989, Robert and Andrée Bourassa and his entourage were flying by private jet to Dakar for the third Sommet de la Francophonie. “Everyone else was asleep, including his wife,” recalled Poupart, who saw an opening to raise a delicate subject. “Have you made up your mind whether you’re running again?” Poupart asked. “Yes, but it will be my last campaign,” replied Bourassa, who looked over at his sleeping wife. “But I still have to negotiate it with her.” By 1993, there was no question of negotiating anything with Andrée Bourassa other than the timing of his retirement announcement. She had always been fiercely protective of the man she sometimes called “mon beau Robert.” For her, the paramount issue was not the state of Quebec but the state of his health. As if the constitutional navigations of the previous two years hadn’t been demanding enough, Bourassa was diagnosed with a relapse of melanoma in December 1992 and had to be away from his post for difficult treatments again in Feburary and March 1993. He often said that there was no such thing as a good time to leave, but the time he chose was September 14, 1993, in the middle of a

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federal election campaign. “It’s not an easy day, to be very honest with you,” Bourassa said after his retirement announcement in the Salon Rouge of the National Assembly, where hundreds of Liberal faithful, friends, and family greeted him with an emotional standing ovation. “When you give the best of yourself and are fighting every day, you do not leave that function easily.” “But he couldn’t do it anymore,” Poupart said. “In his mind, his family had become more important than politics. And in politics, that’s the time to leave.” There was, moreover, the related question of his health. “He knew his road was short,” Poupart said. “And he would rather spend that time with his family. There were limits to his passion for politics.” But in his retirement announcement, Bourassa reserved some passion for the eternal question of Quebec and Canada. “Quebec can never win by splitting Canada into three parts,” he declared. “The independence of Quebec is geo-political nonsense.” On January 11, 1994, Bourassa resigned as premier, to be succeeded by Daniel Johnson, who had won the Liberal leadership by acclamation, thus avoiding a family feud. Bourassa retained his seat in the legislature until summer, and he soon began working to manage his legacy. As holder of the Jean Monnet chair at the Université de Montréal, he organized the Bourassa years into four decades, from the 1960s to the 1990s. He had governed in three of those decades, the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. He had been leader of the Liberal party for seventeen years and premier of Quebec for fifteen years. He had seen the economic triumphs of James Bay and free trade, the constitutional travails of Victoria, Meech, and Charlottetown, and the linguistic turmoil of Bill 22, Bill 178, and finally Bill 86, which put Quebec at peace on the language question. But those three issues—the economy, the Constitution, and language—would define the parameters of the Bourassa years and shape the outline of his legacy. For himself, he became a full-time grandfather, doting on François Bourassa’s two sons, Mathieu and Simon, particularly the older one. He would wait for Mathieu outside his pre-school in Outremont, where Lucien Bouchard’s son Alexandre was in the same class. “I would run into him at the school, and we would talk,” said Bouchard, recalling that they sometimes shared a park bench and discussed politics as the two boys played nearby. The election of September 1994 returned the pq to power under Jacques Parizeau, with his fast-track agenda for sovereignty. As Parizeau said frankly at the time, he didn’t go to Quebec to run a government but to create a country. With the referendum called for October 30, 1995, on the pq’s question of sovereignty and partnership with Canada, there was again a modest supporting role for Bourassa. Early

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in the campaign, he flew to Washington for a major address on September 20 to the Canadian-American Business Council at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. “The attachment of Quebecers to Canada is deep and profound,” Bourassa said in a speech televised live in Canada on cbc Newsworld. “And because of that, because they know the survival of Canada is at stake, because a Yes vote would split Canada into three parts, they will think twice when they vote on October 30.” He added: “And I can tell you that prudence is still a popular virtue in Quebec.” It was the last major public appearance of his life. But as the No campaign encountered increasing problems from the “Bouchard effect” in the last three weeks of October, Bourassa was called in to work the “B circuit,” as he had in 1980. The No campaign’s commanding 60 to 40 lead in the polls at the beginning of October had evaporated by month’s end. By the final weekend, polls by crop and Léger & Léger called it 50 to 50, while a som poll for Le Soleil and The Gazette on October 27 had the Yes campaign leading 46 to 40 among decided voters. By calculating that undecideds would break to the No by a 3 to 1 margin, as voting history suggested, the poll projected a No victory by 50.5 to 49.5 percent. It was the day of the big Canadian unity rally at Place du Canada in Montreal. The No campaign had better numbers than that from Quebec Liberal pollster Grégoire Gollin, as analyzed by Maurice Pinard, dean of Quebec public opinion polling. Pinard’s analysis of Gollin’s numbers, presented that morning to No strategists, confidently forecast a No victory in a range of 53 to 57 percent. Bourassa shared that confidence. He believed in what he called the “ballot box bonus,” which usually saw the pq and the Yes option overpolled by several points. “We should be all right for a good 52 percent,” he predicted on the afternoon of the vote. His only concern was the turnout. “If it’s over 88 percent, anything can happen.” Anything almost did. The turnout was 93.5 percent with, as he had correctly sensed, a massive youth vote for the Yes. In the end, the No prevailed by 50.58 to 49.42 percent. The No won by only 54,000 votes out of 4.67 million cast. With a swing of only 27,000 votes, the No campaign could well have lost the country. Parizeau had made it very clear that he would move quickly to a unilateral declaration of independence. French President Jacques Chirac, appearing on cnn’s Larry King Live, had said France would “recognize the reality” of a Yes vote. Bourassa shared the view that there was an element of Meech payback in the narrow escape for the federalists. “It all could have been avoided,” he said sadly. In Lucien Bouchard’s view, “The one thing the

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hardline federalists forget is that Meech made everything possible. We would have been united rather than divided as Quebecers. There would have been a certain burst of creativity which we’ve been denied. All that because of the loss of Meech.” As late as June 1996, Bourassa appeared to be in good health. “He was very upbeat,” recalled Anthony Wilson-Smith of Maclean’s, who spent time interviewing him at the Maplewood house in Outremont for a book project on the federal Liberal party. “He said he watched the debates in the National Assembly on cable every day,” commented Wilson-Smith. “He was literally rubbing his hands in delight as he talked about Bouchard, saying how much he would have liked to take him on.” Said Bourassa of Bouchard: “He’s a tremendous performer in the National Assembly, a performer worthy of me. It would be a lot of fun to be across from him.” As for his health, Bourassa told his visitor that “he was feeling fine, or said he was.” But by summer he had suffered another relapse of cancer, and he was hospitalized at Notre-Dame in Montreal. By late September, it was clear that this time he would not recover. “We’re going to the next phase,” explained his doctor, oncologist Joseph Ayoub, about another stage of what had become palliative care. Dr. Ayoub told Bourassa how the hospital had been flooded with good wishes and expressions of concern. “Quebec loves you, Mr. Bourassa,” he told him. Bourassa could not hold back his tears. Early on the morning of October 2, 1996, he died. He was sixty-three years old. Andrée Simard Bourassa, who had been with him through all the cancer treatments of the previous six years, was with him to the end. “When he died,” Lucien Bouchard would recall, “I remembered what he had done for Lévesque, and that he had done it with a certain élan, but with dignity.” Now it was Bouchard’s turn to do the same for Bourassa, assuring Andrée Bourassa that his state funeral would be conducted in the same spirit. When Bourassa’s closed coffin lay in state for two days at the National Assembly, she stood by it the entire time, shaking hands with thousands who came to pay their respects. “I often thought of Bourassa,” Bouchard would say years after his passing. “As premier, I worked at Duplessis’s desk, and I often thought, Lévesque and Bourassa worked in this room. The nineties were a very difficult time, and with his illness, his last years in government must have been especially difficult for him. I’ve asked myself if I could have run Quebec if I had cancer. He governed in the most tumultuous period in the history of Quebec.” Bourassa’s final journey home to Montreal brought him to the Basilique Notre-Dame and a funeral mass on the afternoon of October 7, conducted by Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte. “Political life is

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demanding, and our society is often hard on politicians, even unjust,” Cardinal Turcotte said in his eulogy. “But he knew how to face up to the storms.” At Andrée Bourassa’s insistence, the balconies of the great cathedral had been reserved for the general public, who responded with applause at the entrance of some familiar dignitaries. Bourassa would have liked that. He would have been touched by the presence of Dominique Michel, the comedienne who had sent him the televised get-well card. He would have been impressed by the arrival of Mike Harris and all the living former premiers of Ontario—Bill Davis, Frank Miller, David Peterson, and Bob Rae—who had flown in together and sat together at Notre-Dame. “We all had a relationship with him in varying degrees,” Peterson said later. “It was a historic moment. A lot of Upper Canadians of all political stripes were saying, here was a good guy, a federalist, and Ontario’s most important partner in Confederation. It was a demonstration of respect.” New Brunswick’s Frank McKenna, by then the dean of Canada’s premiers, would later say of Bourassa: “Of the premiers I served with, he was pre-eminent in terms of stature, gentility, and intelligence. He was unfailingly courteous, and always so well briefed.” Lucien Bouchard, who led the official mourners with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, later suggested, “We have to remember him as a premier who raised the standards of the office in terms of dignity, perspicacity, and intelligence.” In every hall he ever appeared in, Bourassa always measured the crowd. As his coffin was carried into the golden sunlight of that October afternoon, the crowd at Place d’Armes burst into applause. “Pas trop pire,” he would have said. “Not bad at all.”

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Lina Allard Alycia Ambroziak Jean Bazin Michèle Bazin Pierre Bibeau Georges Boudreault Robert Bourassa Andrée Bourassa Albert Breton Claude Bruneau André Burelle Robert Burns Philippe Casgrain Thérèse Casgrain Réal Charbonneau Jean Chrétien John Ciaccia Dominique Clift Michel Cogger Yvan Corbeil Tim Creery Paul Desrochers Richard Dicerni Jean-V. Dufresne Evelyn Dumas

Claude Dupras Gérard Filion Claude Forget Diane Fortier Michel Fournel Jean-Pierre Fournier Bill Fox Francis Fox Jacques Francoeur Soucy Gagné Raymond Garneau Louis de G. Giguère Louise Gilbert Carl Goldenberg Eddie Goldenberg Patrick Gossage Gilles Hébert Daniel Johnson Pierre Juneau Marc Lalonde Jacques Lamoureaux Bernard Langevin Thérèse Lavoie-Roux Gérald Leblanc Jean-Claude Leclerc

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Pierre Lefebvre Claude Lemelin Gérard D. Lévesque Reford MacDougall Marcel Masse Jean Masson Jim McCann Robert McConnell Robert McCoy Robert McKenzie Léonce Mercier Pierre Mercier Jean-Pierre Mongeau Claude Morin (Ottawa) Jason Moscovitz Brian Mulroney Ross Munro Jean-Pierre Nadeau Peter C. Newman Pierre C. O’Neil Pierre O’Neill André Ouellet Jean-Pierre Ouellet John Parisella Denys Pelletier

Gérard Pelletier Pierre Pettigrew Laurent Picard Maurice Pinard Guy Potvin André Raynauld Louis Rémillard Jean Rivard Jean-Claude Rivest Michel Robert Louise Robic Guy Rocher Michel Roy Claude Ryan Gerald Ryan Madeleine Ryan Yves Ryan Lucette St. Amant Bernard St. Laurent Guy Saint-Pierre Jeanne Sauvé Maurice Sauvé George Springate Larry Wilson

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348 Bibliography Ciaccia, John. The Oka Crisis: A Mirror of the Soul. Montréal: Maren Publications, 2000. Clarkson, Stephen, and Christina McCall. Trudeau and Our Times. Vol. 1; The Magnificent Obsession. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Cohen, Andrew. A Deal Undone: The Making and Breaking of the Meech Lake Accord. Vancouver, Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1990. Coyne, Deborah. Roll of the Dice: Working with Clyde Wells during the Meech Lake Negotiations. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1992. Crosbie, John C. No Holds Barred: My Life in Politics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Delacourt, Susan. United We Fall: In Search of a New Canada. Toronto: Penguin, 1994. Desbarats, Peter. Canada Lost: Canada Found. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. – René: A Canadian in Search of a Country. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Fox, Bill. Spinwars: Politics and New Media. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1999. Fraser, Graham. Playing for Keeps: The Making of the Prime Minister, 1988. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. – René Lévesque & the Parti Québécois in Power. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Fraser, Matthew. Quebec Inc: French Canadian Entrepreneurs and the New Business Elite. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1987. Gagnon, Alain, and Mary Beth Montcalm. Quebec: Beyond the Quiet Revolution. Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1989. Gagnon, Georgette, and Dan Rath. Not without Cause: David Peterson’s Fall from Grace. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1991. Godin, Pierre. René Lévesque, héros malgré lui, 1960–1976. Montréal: Boréal, 1997. Gossage, Patrick. Close to the Charisma: My Years between the Press and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Graham, Ron. One-Eyed Kings: Promise and Illusion in Canadian Politics. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1986. Granatstein, J.L., and Kenneth McNaught, eds. English Canada Speaks Out. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1991. Greenspon, Edward and Anthony Wilson-Smith. Double Vision: The Inside Story of the Liberals in Power. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1996. Gwyn, Richard. The 49th Paradox: Canada in North America. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. – Trudeau: The Northern Magus. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980. Hart, Michael. What’s Next: Canada, the Global Economy and the New Trade Policy. Ottawa: Centre for Trade Policy and Law, 1994.

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349 Bibliography – with Bill Dymond and Colin Robertson. Decision at Midnight: Inside the Canada–US Free Trade Negotiations. Vancouver: ubc Press, 1994. Hayes, David. Power and Influence: The Globe and Mail and the News Revolution. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1992. Hillmer, Norman, ed. Pearson: The Unlikely Gladiator. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Hogg, Peter. The Meech Lake Constitutional Accord, Annotated. Toronto: Carswell, 1988. Howe, Paul, and Peter H. Russell, eds. Judicial Power and Canadian Democracy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Lee, Philip. Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank McKenna. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2001. Lee, Robert Mason. One Hundred Monkeys: The Triumph of Popular Wisdom in Canadian Politics. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1989. Leslie, Peter. Rebuilding the Relationship: Quebec and Its Confederation Partners. Kingston: Institute of Intergovernmental Affairs, Queen’s University, 1987. Lévesque, René. Memoirs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. – An Option for Quebec. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Lisee, Jean-François. Le naufrageur: Robert Bourassa et les Québécois, 1991–1992. Montréal: Boréal, 1994. – Le tricheur: Robert Bourassa et les Québécois, 1990–1991. Montréal: Boréal, 1994. Macdonald, Donald S., chair. Report of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada. Ottawa: Government of Canada, 1985. MacDonald, L. Ian. Mulroney: The Making of the Prime Minister. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984. – ed. Free Trade: Risks and Rewards. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. MacDonald, Larry. The Bombardier Story. Etobicoke: John Wiley and Sons Canada, 2001. Martin, Lawrence. The Antagonist: Lucien Bouchard and the Politics of Delusion. Toronto: Viking, Penguin Books, 1997. – Chrétien: The Will to Win. Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1995. – Pledge of Allegiance: The Americanization of Canada in the Mulroney Years. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Martin, Patrick, Allan Gregg and George Perlin. Contenders: The Tory Quest for Power. Scarborough: Prentice-Hall Canada, 1983. McCall-Newman, Christina. Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1982. McKenna, Brian, and Susan Purcell. Drapeau. Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1980. McWhinney, Edward. Canada and the Constitution, 1979–1982: Patriation and the Charter of Rights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

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350 Bibliography Monahan, Patrick. Meech Lake: The Inside Story. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Mulroney, Brian. Address to the Canadian Jewish Congress. Montreal, September 10, 2000. – Address to the Investment Dealers Association of Canada. La Malbaie, Quebec, June 18, 2001. – Address to the Nation. cbc Television, June 4, 1987; June 23, 1990. – Address to the Newfoundland House of Assembly. Debates of the House of Assembly, June 21, 1990. – “Behind Closed Doors.” Maclean’s, June 15, 1987. – Shaping Canada’s Future Togther. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1991. – Speeches to the House of Commons on the Meech Lake Accord. House of Commons Debates, May 1, 11, October 21, 1987; June 14, 1988; June 2, 1989. – Statements on the signing of the Meech Lake and Meech Lake and Companion Accords, Ottawa: Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat, June 3, 1987, and June 9, 1990. – Where I Stand. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983. Murray, Don, and Vera Murray. De Bourassa à Lévesque. Montréal: Quinze, 1978. Murray, Lowell. “Le baroud d’honneur de M. Trudeau.” Le Devoir (Montréal), May 30, 1987. Newman, Peter C. The Canadian Revolution, 1985–1995: From Deference to Defiance. Toronto: Viking Press, 1995. – The Distemper of Our Times. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Pelletier, Gérard. Years of Impatience, 1950–1960. Translated by Allan Brock. Toronto: Methuen, 1984. Pepin, Jean-Luc, and John Robarts, co-chairs, Task Force on Canadian Unity. A Future Together: Observations and Recommendations. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1979. Porter, Michael E. The Competitive Advantage of Nations. New York: The Free Press, 1990. Rae, Bob. From Protest to Power: Personal Reflections on a Life in Politics. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada, 1996 Remillard, Gil. Le fédéralisme canadien. Tome 2, Le répatriement de la Constitution. Montréal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 1982. Ritchie, Gordon. Wrestling with the Elephant: The Inside Story of the Canada-U.S. Trade Wars. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter and Ross, 1997. Romanow, Roy, John Whyte, and Howard Leeson. Canada . . . Notwithstanding: The Making of the Constitution, 1976–1982. Toronto: Carswell Methuen 1984. Russell, Peter H. Constitutional Odyssey. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

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351 Bibliography Ryan, Claude. Le Devoir et la Crise d’octobre. Montréal: hmh, 1971. – A Stable Society: Quebec after the PQ. Edited and translated by Robert Guy Scully with Marc Plourde. Montréal: hmh, 1977. Sawatsky, John. Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter and Ross, 1991. Scott, Ian, with Neil McCormick. To Make a Difference: A Memoir. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 2001. Segal, Hugh. No Surrender: Reflections of a Happy Warrior in the Tory Crusade. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996. Sheppard, Robert, and Michael Valpy. The National Deal: The Fight for a Canadian Constitution. Toronto: Fleet, 1982. Simpson, Jeffrey. Discipline of Power: The Conservative Interlude and the Liberal Restoration. Toronto: Personal Library, 1980. – Faultlines: Struggling for a Canadian Vision. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. – Star Spangled Canadians: Canadians Living the American Dream. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2000. Sullivan, Martin. Mandate ’68: The Year of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Toronto, New York : Doubleday, 1968. Swinton, K.E., and C.J. Rogerson. Competing Constitutional Visions: The Meech Lake Accord. Toronto: Carswell, 1988. Thomson, Dale C. Jean Lesage & the Quiet Revolution. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1984. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. Federalism and the French Canadians. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968. – Lettre Ouverte aux Québécois, July 15, 1980. – Open Letter to Le Devoir. December 30, 1980. – “ ‘Say Goodby to the Dream’ of One Canada.” Toronto Star. May 27, 1987. – Testimony before the Senate Committee of the Whole. Senate Debates. March 30, 1988. – A Time for Action: Toward the Renewal of the Canadian Federation. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1978. Vastel, Michel. Bourassa. Translated by Hubert Bauch. Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1991. – Landry: Le grand dérangement. Montréal: Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2001. Wade, Mason. The French Canadians, 1760–1967. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1968. Wells, Clyde K. Speech to the Newfoundland House of Assembly on the Meech Lake Accord. Debates of the House of Assembly, June 22, 1990. – Statement issued by the Office of the Premier of Newfoundland, July 3, 1990. – Statement on the signing of the Meech Lake and Companion Accords, Ottawa: Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat, June 9, 1990.

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352 Bibliography

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Index

Acton, Lord, 155 Air Canada, 75, 115, 178, Air Creebec, 324 Allaire, Jean, 323, 329–31, 335 Allaire, Yvan, 106–7 Allaire Report, 264, 329–31 Allard, Lina, 90, 104, 106 American Hockey League, 308–9 Anderson, George, 124 Aquinas, Thomas, 86 Asselin, André, 236–7 Axworthy, Tom, 273 Ayoub, Joseph, 343 Baker, James A., 290 Baldwin, Robert, 25 Bané, Pierre de, 128, 165 Bank of Montreal, 239 Bazin, Jean, 174 Bazin, Michèle, 204

Beaudoin, Gérald, 22, 309, 336 Beaudoin, Laurent, 284 Beaugrand-Champagne, Guy, 142–3, 172–3 Beauregard, Élie, 21 Bédard, Marc-André, 46, 109–10, 304 Bégin, Monique, 128, 132, 165 “Beige Paper,” 59, 83, 96–8, 105, 157 Bélanger, Charles, 15, 31 Bélanger, Marcel, 221 Bélanger, Michel, 322–3 Bélanger-Campeau Commission, 322–3, 329, 331, 335–6 Bélanger Commission, 221, 223 Belleval, Denis de, 174 Bennett, Bill, 246 Berthiaume, Paul, 47

Bertrand, Jean-Jacques, 136, 223 Bertrand, Mario, 287 Bibeau, Pierre, 71–3, 77, 102, 106–7, 110, 133, 159, 176, 178, 192–4, 200, 202, 236, 238, 285 Bill C-60, 272 Bill One. See Bill 101 Bill 2, 59, 74 Bill 8, 274 Bill 22, 8, 17, 45, 211, 297, 341 Bill 86, 331, 341 Bill 92, 37, 74 Bill 101, 20, 59–60, 211, 212, 294 Bill 150, 322, 331, 335, 337–9 Bill 178, 283, 294–7, 307, 331, 341 Biron, Rodrique, 11 Bissonette, Lise, 89, 101, 103 Black, Conrad, 269

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354 Index Blain, Maurice, 273 Blakeney, Allen, 247 Bloc Populaire, 217 Bloc Québécois, 323 Boivin, Jean-Roch, 116, 223 Bombardier, 261, 284–5 Bongo, Haj Omar, 288 Bonnell, Edsel, 316, Bouchard, Lucien, 137, 267, 282–3, 285–8, 303–5, 321–3, 332, 334–5, 339, 341–4 Boudreault, Georges, 32, 34–6, 38, 42, 45, 102 Bouey, Gerald, 126 Bourassa, Adrienne, 217 Bourassa, Andrée, 62, 135, 137, 206, 214, 229, 242, 264–5, 321, 340, 343–4 Bourassa, Aubert, 217 Bourassa, François, 11, 135, 137, 220, 229, 260, 341 Bourassa, Henri, 3, 6, 47, 67, 89 Bourassa, Mimi, 137, 229 Bourassa, Robert, 4–9, 11–18, 23, 29, 32, 35, 44–5, 58, 62–3, 67, 69, 71, 112, 115–17, 135–8, 140, 153–6, 174, 177, 193, 196, 198, 200–1, 205–32, 239, 241–5, 247–52, 254, 256–65, 268, 270, 274–8, 280–99, 301–13, 316, 320–4, 326, 328–44 Bourassa, Toussaint, 217

Bourgault, Pierre, 112, 209, 212 Brassard, Jacques, 333 Brébeuf College, 174, 218 Breton, Albert, 85, 145–6, 156 Breton, Raymond, 85, 145 Bristol Aviation, 284 British North America Act, 7 Broadbent, Ed, 279, 313 Brodeur, Pierre, 180–1 Brown, George, 6 Brownlee, Bonnie, 313 Bruneau, Claude, 145 Buchanan, John, 247, 280 Bujold, Rémi, 126 Buldoc, Roch, 249, 283 Burelle, André, 144, 166, 168–9, 178–9, 268–9 Burney, Derek, 267, 291 Burns, Robert, 79, 163, 170, 174 Bussières, Pierre, 128, 165 Cadieux, Fernand, 85, 147–8 Caisse de Dépot et Placement du Québec, 118, 283, 322 Callaghan, Jim, 7 Cameron, Bill, 317 Cameron, Jamie, 311 Campeau, Jean, 322–3 Canadair, 261, 284 Canada-US Auto Pact, 237 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 21, 60, 177–8, 230,

270, 273, 297, 315, 317, 342 Canadian Manifesto, 9, 146, 172. See also Pour Une Politique Fonctionelle Canadian National, 75 Canadian Unity Information Office, 123, 128, 130, 133 Canard Enchaîné, Le, 332 Capelli, Paul, 102–3 Carpentier, Michel, 187 Carstairs, Sharon, 307, 310, 318, 320 Carter, Emmett Cardinal, 269 Casgrain, Claire. See Kirkland-Casgrain, Claire Casgrain group, 14–18, 22, 25, 30–1 Casgrain, Philippe, 13–18, 21–3, 25–6, 28, 30, 33, 35, 225. See also Casgrain group Casgrain, Thérèse, 104 Cashin, Richard, 318 Castonguay, Claude, 23–5, 32, 75, 201 Catholic Action, 5, 9, 39, 64, 77, 83–4, 86–8, 134, 142–4, 146–7 cbc. See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cfcf television, 193, 256 cfrb, 247 Chaput-Rolland, Solange, 133, 180, 204 Charbonneau, JeanPierre, 12

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355 Index Charest, Jean, 238, 302–3, 307, 329–30, 332, 339 Charest Report, 302–4 Charlebois, Robert, 245 Charlottetown Accord, 287, 337–8, 340–1 Charron, Claude, 105–6, 187, 332–3 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 198, 239, 271–2, 275–8, 280, 295, 303, 307, 309, 312, 323 Charter of the French Language. See Bill 101 Chastelain, John de, 327 Chevrette, Guy, 285–6 Chevrier, Lionel, 220, Chirac, Jacques, 342 Choquette, Jérôme, 45, 286 Chrétien, Aline, 180 Chrétien, Jean, 16, 18, 23–5, 38, 41, 46, 51, 91, 106–7, 109–11, 115, 121–4, 126–8, 131–2, 134, 138, 159, 165, 169, 175, 179–81, 226, 274, 278, 282–3, 289, 293, 304, 310, 318–20, 323–4, 344 Ciaccia, John, 24, 51, 198, 202, 297, 302, 324–6 Cité Libre, 143, 146, 270, 273 City and District Savings Bank, 196, 225 cjad, 247 ckac, 247 Clarity Act, 323

Clark, Joe, 94–5, 122–3, 130, 157–8, 163–5, 228, 291, 336–7, 339 Cliche Commission, 206 Cliche, Robert, 148, 206, 285 Clift, Dominique, 155 cnn, 325,342 Cogger, Michel, 174 Cohen, Andrew, 279, 318 Committee for Political Realism, 9, 145–7. See also Group of Seven Commonwealth Cooperative Federation (ccf), 219 Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux (csn), 234 Congrès des Affaires Canadiennes, 254 Constitution, The, 185, 197–8, 235–6, 239, 243, 245–6, 248–53, 257, 268, 271–6, 279–81, 295, 299, 306, 313, 318, 323, 336, 338, 341 Corbeil, Jean, 200 Corbeil, Michel, 200 Corbeil, Yvan, 85, 184 Coté-Lévesque, Corinne, 334 Coté, Marc-Yvon, 225 Coté, Pierre, 77–8 Council of Canadian Unity, 73 Coutts, Jim, 178 Coyne, Deborah, 310, 318, 320 Creery, Tim, 10 Créditistes, 36, 130, 224

crop, 184, 189, 231, 321, 342 Crosbie, John, 292, 317–19 Cross, James, 152 csn. See Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux Cuerrier, Louise, 189 Cullen-Couture Agreement, 250, 255, 271–2 Dafoe, John, 6 Davis, Bill, 247, 254–5, 344 Davos Conference, 301, 335 Dawson, Dennis, 126 Delacourt, Susan, 314–15 Delors, Jacques, 335 Democratic Crédistes, 122 Department of Health and Welfare, 132 Derome, Bernard, 257 Deschamps, Yvon, 65 Desmarais, Paul, 24, 226 Desmarais, Renée, 102 Desrochers, Paul, 29–30, 38–42, 69–71, 136, 193–4, 223–4 Desrosiers, Claude, 193, 224 Devine, Grant, 247, 316 Devoir, Le, 3–6, 10–12, 19–20, 23, 25, 27–8, 31, 37–9, 41–2, 47, 49–50, 53, 61, 63–4, 66–7, 73, 87–9, 98, 101, 103, 105, 123, 134, 142, 144, 146–53,

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356 Index 155, 173, 181, 184, 186, 196, 211, 218–19, 221, 226, 249, 272–3 Dicerni, Richard, 130–1, 133–4 Dickson, Brian, 279 Diefenbaker, John, 220, 268 Dimanche-Matin, 104, 123, 165, 168, 176 Dion, Léon, 90 Dion, Stephane, 323 distinct society (clause), 249–50, 252–3, 255–6, 268, 274–5, 277–9, 295, 304, 307, 309–10, 312, 320–1, 338 Dobbie, Dorothy, 336 Dobbin, Craig, 318 Doer, Gary, 307, 310 Dontigny, Andrée, 104 Dorais, José, 15 Drapeau, Jean, 18, 38, 86, 153, 207 duality clause, 256, 271, 279, 304, 307 Duchaine Inquiry, 217 Dudley, Sandra Wheaton, 84, 86 Dufresne, Jean-V., 82, 89 Duhamel, Yvon, 206 Dumont, Fernand, 85 Dumont, Mario, 323, 330–1 Duplessis, Maurice, 19, 60, 64, 82, 143, 217, 219, 232 Dupont, Raymond, 126–7 Dupras, Claude, 122 Dupras, Maurice, 126 Dussault, Jacques, 106–7, 133

Economic Council of Canada, 5, 15, 40, 83, 141 Economist, The, 332 Edmonton Declaration, 252 Elizabeth II, 287–8 Elkas, Sam, 325 Equality Party, 295, 297, 304, 307 European Common Market, 17, 62 European Community, 302 European Union, 302 Expo ’86, 286 Federal Provincial Relations Office (fpro), 123, 248, 268, 291 Ferland, Jean-Pierre, 245 Filiatrault, Denise, 191 Filion, Gérard, 88, 146 Filmon, Gary, 295, 307, 310, 315–16, 318–19, 323 flq. See Front de Libération du Québec Ford Foundation, 220 Forget, Claude, 22, 30, 32, 35, 42, 90–1, 174, 201 Forrestal, Tom, 269 Forsey, Eugene, 268 Fortier, Diane, 100, 102, 104 Fortier, D’Iberville, 279 Fortier, Pierre, 184, 200 Fox, Bill, 313 Fox, Francis, 15, 128, 142, 165–6, 174, 225, 293

France-Canada Association, 219 Francophonie, La, 240, 267, 282–3, 288–9, 340 Fraser, Graham, 196, 242–3 Free Trade Agreement (fta), 238, 283, 289–90, 292–4, 297, 332–3, 341 French, Richard, 295 Front de Libération du Québec (flq), 125, 152, 154 Frum, Barbara, 273 fta. See Free Trade Agreement Fulton, Davie, 254 Gagné, Soucy, 85, 184 Gagnier, Dan, 291, 311, 316 Gagnon, Lysiane, 103, 129, 305 Gallup, George, 11, 96, 184 Gallup Poll, 11, 96 Garneau, Pauline, 225 Garneau, Raymond, 18, 31, 38, 44–7, 50–9, 61–2, 66–9, 78–80, 93, 138, 176, 196, 214, 216, 225, 230, 289 Garon, Jean, 174, 187, 238 Gaudette, Michel, 200–1 Gauthier, Yvon, 145 Gazette, The, 9–10, 26, 189, 192, 196, 203, 208, 289, 342 General Dynamics, 127 General Motors, 128, 240

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Page 357

357 Index Gens de l’Air dispute, 17 Gerin-Lajoie, Paul, 223 Getty, Don, 246–7, 252–3, 262, 290, 292, 310–11, 314 Ghiz, Joe, 247, 262, 291, 310–11 Giasson, Julien, 39, 42 Giguère, Bob, 125 Gilbert, David, 318 Girard, Normand, 117 Globe and Mail, The, 129, 169, 242, 272, 314–15 Gobeil, Paul, 239 Godin, Gérald, 11 Godin, Sylvie, 324 Gold, Alan B., 250, 326 Goldbloom, Victor, 47, 79, 83, 92 Goldenberg, Carl, 221 Goldenberg, Eddie, 23, 106–7, 123–6, 132–4, 310 Gollin, Grégoire, 320, 342 Gossage, Patrick, 134, 178, 182 Goyer, Jean-Pierre, 22 Gratton, Michel, 24 Gregg, Allan, 131 Group of Seven, 9, 145–7, 172. See also Committee for Political Realism Guibault, Camille, 303 Gzowski, Peter, 220 Hamilton, Richard, 9 Harper, Elijah, 297, 315, 319–20 Harris, Mike, 311, 344 Hartt, Stanley, 287, 310

Harvard University, 29, 133, 142, 220, 293 Harvey, George, 49 Hatfield, Richard, 247, 251, 256, 262, 280, 299, 307 Heath, Edward, 208 Hébert, G. René, 21 Hébert, Gilles, 21–3, 28, 35–6, 38–9, 42, 49, 71, 106 Hellyer, Paul, 149–50 Hibernia, 317–19 Hogg, Peter, 278, 311 Hogue, Jean-Pierre, 200 Horsman, Jim, 249 Hudson’s Bay Company, 324 Hyundai, 240 Hydro-Québec, 237 Hynatshyn, Ray, 262 Iacobucci, Frank, 278 Imprimerie Populaire, L’, 42, 88 Institut Canadien d’Education des Adultes L’, 86, 143–4 Institut de cueillette de l’information, L’(inci), 9 Institute of Intergovernmental Affairs, Queen’s University, 248 Institut Québecois d’Opinion Publique (iqop), Inc., 104, 106, 123, 126, 176–7, 235 Jackson, Jesse, 325 James Bay, 17, 115, 117, 120, 136, 205,

207–8, 212, 237, 324, 341 Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique (jec), 84, 147 Jeunesse Indépendante Catholique (jic), 84 Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (joc), 84–5 Jeunesse Rural Catholique (jrc), 84 Johns Hopkins University, 63, 209 Johnson, Daniel, 57, 86, 149, 170, 201, 203, 216, 222–3, 225, 227, 230–1, 240, 259, 320, 332–3, 340–1 Johnson, Pierre Marc, 170, 187, 235, 238, 240, 242, 260, 298, 332–3 Johnston, Don, 165, 274 Juneau, Pierre, 85, 87, 143 Keable Commission, 76, 216–17 Kent Commission, 85 Kierans, Eric, 118 Kierans, Thomas, 237 Kirkland-Casgrain, Claire, 14 Kohl, Helmut, 302 Labelle, Suzanne, 217 Laberge, Louis, 108, 154–5 Lafond, Maurice, 85 Lafontaine, LouisHippolyte, 25 L’Allier, Jean-Paul, 22 Lalonde, Fernand, 15, 92

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358 Index Lalonde, Francine, 233 Lalonde, Marc, 9, 16, 77–8, 84–5, 128, 146, 153–4, 156, 165, 172, 177, 226 Lamer, Antonio, 219 Lamontagne, Gilles, 103, 165 Lamontagne, Maurice, 127 Lamoureux, Jacques, 36, 38, 42, 49, 61–2, 71–2, 77, 82, 89–90, 200, 204 Landry, Bernard, 174, 238, 242, 285, 333 Langevin, Bernard, 49–50, 176–7, 180 Langevin, Hector, 49, 275 Langlois, Raynold, 83, 96 Lapalme, GeorgesEmile, 63 Lapointe, Charles, 128, 165 Lapointe, Hugues, 206 Laporte, Pierre, 29, 135, 152, 223 Larin, Jean, 228 LaSalle, Roch, 188–9 Laschinger, John, 311 Laurendeau, André, 88, 218, 254 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 67 Laurin, Camille, 20–1, 172, 211, 235 Laval University, 107, 127, 130, 174–5, 209, 232, 248, 254, 267, 282 Laviollette, Herb, 178 Lavoie, Luc, 304 Lavoie-Roux, Thérèse, 15, 91–2, 200–1 Leblanc, Gérald, 8, 10, 12, 89

Leclerc, Aurelian, 27 Lee, Jim, 247 Lefevbre, Pierre, 128, 130–1 Léger, Jean-Marc, 88 Léger & Léger, 321, 342 Lemelin, Claude, 89, 123, 130, 152 LeMoignan, Michel, 109 Lennie, Oryssia, 254 Lepage, Michel, 183, 238 Lesage, Jean, 7, 13–14, 22, 24, 29, 44, 56–8, 60, 62–3, 74, 80, 84, 112, 116–19, 121, 125, 135 , 177, 193, 198, 201, 210–11, 216, 221–3, 233–4, 243, 254, 283, 333 Leslie, Peter, 248 Les Québecois pour le Non, 107, 134. See also Referendum 1980 Lévesque, Corinne, 178. See also CotéLévesque, Corinne Lévesque, Gabriel, 115 Lévesque, GeorgesHenri, 85, 107–8 Lévesque, Gérard D., 14, 25, 38, 51, 53, 58–61, 63, 68, 71, 74, 80, 92, 95, 116, 198, 201, 203, 225, 256 Lévesque, René, 4, 8–9, 13, 19–20, 22–3, 28, 37, 39, 53, 57, 59, 65, 74, 83, 88, 94–6, 100–1, 104, 106, 109, 111–19, 126–8, 130, 132–3, 136–7, 154–60, 162–3,

166–70, 173–6, 178–80, 182–8, 190–1, 194, 198–9, 205–6, 208–12, 216, 222–3, 226, 229, 231, 234–5, 238–9, 243, 250, 254, 282–3, 285, 304, 333–4, 343 Lewis, Stephen, 313 Ligue Ouvrière Catholique (loc), 84 Lincoln, Clifford, 295 Lippmann, Walter, 6 Lisée, Jean-François, 322 London School of Economics, 142 Lortie, Marc, 257, 304 Lougheed, Peter, 97–8, 246, 253–5 Lussier, Charles, 143 Lyon, Sterling, 247 McCallum, John, 293 McCann, Jim, 102, 105, 187, 192 McConnell, Robert, 10 McDougall, John, 91 MacDougall, Reford, 78 Macdonald, Donald, 333 McDonald, Patrick, 166 MacDonald, Pierre, 239 McDonald Royal Commission, 15, 76, 85 Macdonald, Sir John A., 275, 312 McGill University, 9, 145–6, 175, 229 McGovern, George, 238

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359 Index Mackasey, Bryce, 79 Mackay, Robert, 170 McKenna, Frank, 295, 299, 303, 307–8, 310, 315–16, 318–19, 323, 344 McKenzie, Robert, 92 MacKenzie King Foundation, 220 MacLean, Angus, 247 MacLean’s, 19, 274, 279, 310, 343 McMillan, Charles, 290, 315 Macpherson, Don, 177, 230 McPherson, James, 311 Maldoff, Eric, 310 Malépart, Jean-Claude, 126 Malouf Inquiry, 216 Maltais, André, 126 Manning, Preston, 339 Marchand, DeMontigny, 166, 178 Marchand, Jean, 27, 125, 129, 147, 173 Marler, George, 63 Marois, Pauline, 235, 238, 242 Marois, Pierre, 174 Martin, Paul, 220 Marx, Herbert, 159, 201, 283, 295 Masse, Marcel, 73–4 Masson, Jean, 82 Mazankowski, Don, 291 Meech Lake Accord, 250, 252–4, 257, 262–3, 267–8, 270–6, 279–81, 283, 287, 289, 294–7, 299–309, 311–24, 330, 332, 335, 341–3 Meighen, Michael, 174

Mercier, Honoré, 19 Mercier, Léonce, 56, 106, 134, 176 Mercier, Pierre, 21–3, 34–5, 39–40, 42, 45, 49, 204 Michaud, Yves, 177 Michel, Dominique, 328, 344 Miller, Frank, 344 Monde, Le, 332 Mongeau, Jacques, 219 Mongeau, Jean-Pierre, 15–16, 18, 31, 33 Mongeau, Richard, 15, 31, 224 Montreal Catholic School Commission, 15 Montreal City and District Savings Bank, 45 Montreal International, 294 Montreal Star, The, 136, 155 Morin, Claude, 97, 110–13, 166, 169 Morin, Claude (Ottawa), 211 Morin, Guy, 31–2 Morin, Jacques-Yvan, 172 Morin, Marcelle, 217 Morin, Renée, 91 Mulroney, Brian, 40–2, 70, 157, 174–5, 202, 206–7, 226, 230, 235–6, 240, 246–57, 261–3, 267–97, 302–7, 309, 312–17, 319–20, 323, 326, 330, 334, 337, 339–40 Mulroney, Mila, 313 Munro, Ross, 10,

Murray, Lowell, 251–2, 257, 272–4, 306, 313, 317 Nadeau, Jean-Pierre, 176 nafta. See North American Free Trade Agreement National Bank of Canada, 322 National Film Board, 132 National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment, 240 ndp. See New Democratic Party Near, Harry, 289 New Democratic Party (ndp), 148–9, 246–7, 271, 276, 279, 285, 291, 297, 307, 315 Newman, Peter C., 154–5 Nixon, Richard, 213 North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), 238, 292 Noseworthy, Ralph, 191 notwithstanding clause, 294–7, 307, 331 Nouvelle Entente, La, 113 October Crisis, 152, 156, 160, 211, 217, 224, 326 Ohira, Masayoshi, 168 Oka Crisis, 287, 301, 324–7, 329 O’Leary, Gratia, 116, 170 Olympic Games (Montreal, 1976), 17–18

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360 Index O’Neil, Pierre C., 87, 141–2 O’Neill, Louis, 170 O’Neill, Pierre, 37 Ostiguy, Marcel, 126 Ouellet, André, 16, 36, 51, 72, 128–30, 150, 165, 174, 200, 226 Ouellet, Jean-Pierre, 5, 15–18, 33 Oxford University, 29, 220 Palme, Olof, 269 Paradis, Pierre, 227, 230–1, 259 Parent, Jean-Guy, 242 Parisella, John, 200–1, 287, 294, 296, 298, 308, 320, 322, 325–7, 331, 337–9 Parizeau, Jacques, 44, 106, 112, 187, 209, 235, 237, 282, 292, 298, 304, 309, 321–3, 339, 341–2 Parti Québécois (pq), 3–5, 8–12, 14, 16, 18, 20–1, 32, 39, 44–5, 53, 59, 62, 64–65, 79, 89, 94–5, 97–101, 104–5, 109–12, 116, 123–4, 126, 128, 130, 136, 145, 156, 158–9, 162–3, 166–7, 169, 178, 182–5, 187–90, 192–4, 197–9, 207–9, 212–13, 217, 223–4, 231, 233–5, 237–40, 242–3, 276, 285, 292, 295, 297–9, 304, 332–3, 341–2 Pascau, Pierre, 289 Pawley, Howard, 247,

276–7, 279, 291, 299 Payette, Lise, 100–1, 104–5, 178 pc. See Progressive Conservative Party Pearson, Lester B., 27, 125, 127, 147–9, 220, 254, 270, 283 Peckford, Brian, 247, 262 Pelletier, Anne, 102 Pelletier, Denys, 42–3 Pelletier, Georges, 42 Pelletier, Gérard, 27, 86, 125, 143–5, 147, 150–1, 155–6, 166, 173–4, 177, 254, 270 Pelletier, Irenée, 126 Pépin, Marcel, 154–5 Pépin-Robarts Commission, 164 Peterson, David, 246–7, 252–3, 256–7, 261, 263, 269, 274–81, 291, 293, 295, 299, 307–12, 315–16, 344 Pettigrew, Pierre, 80, 90, 107, 110, 157, 191, 204, 289 Pickersgill, Jack, 220, 313 Pinard, Maurice, 9–11, 16, 85, 145, 147, 172, 184, 189, 192–3, 212, 342 Pinard, Yvon, 128, 225 Pitfield, Michael, 178 Porter, Michael, 293 Poupart, Ronald, 71–3, 76–8, 296, 298, 320–2, 328–9, 331–2, 334, 340–1 Pour Une Politique

Functionelle, 145. See also Canadian Manifesto Power Corporation, 24, 145 pq. See Parti Québécois Pre-Referendum Committee. See ProCanada Committee Presse, La, 103, 129, 144, 189, 203, 231, 235, 269–70, 286, 330 Prieur, Jean, 206, 224 Prince, Vincent, 152 Pro-Canada Committee (prc), 36–7, 60, 72–6, 78, 83, 173 Progressive Conservative Party (pc), 41, 97, 122, 130–1, 147, 150, 157, 174, 207, 226, 235, 237, 246–7, 273, 284–6, 292, 308, 311, 314, 319 Provigo, 239 Quartier-Latin, Le, 219 Quebec Summit. See Francophonie, La Québecair, 115 Quebec-Canada Movement, 75 Quiet Revolution, 13, 24, 56–7, 84, 108, 118, 127, 135, 145, 173, 222, 283 Rabinovitch, Bob, 123 Radio-Canada, 21, 60, 87, 94, 100, 106, 119, 129, 177–8, 180, 212, 228, 257, 270, 328 Radio-Québec, 177 Rae, Bob, 246, 271, 336–7, 344

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361 Index Rae, John, 24, 310 Rassemblement pour L’Indépendance Nationale, 112 Raynauld, André, 5, 7, 15, 25, 40, 83–4, 141, 189, 201, 213 Reagan, Ronald, 190, 227, 290, 328 Reclus, Onesime, 288 referendum (1980), 36–7, 51, 60, 74–8, 80, 91, 94–8, 100–1, 105–6, 109–20, 123, 126–30, 132, 134, 141, 144–5, 157–9, 161–3, 165, 167, 172–3, 175–85, 187, 190, 194, 206, 208–10, 212–13, 216, 246, 268, 271, 273, 304 referendum (1995), 306, 332, 337, 341 Reisman, Simon, 237–8 Rémillard, Gil, 239–40, 248–53, 257–8, 268, 274, 278, 305 Rémillard, Louis, 53, 60–1, 67 Reston, James, 6 Richard, Andrée, 102 Richard, Clément, 174 Rideout, Tom, 308, 318 Rivard, Jean, 203 Rivest, Jean-Claude, 52, 176, 239, 248–9, 278, 287 Robarts, John, 247 Robb, Jim, 226 Robert, Michel, 25–6, 28, 30, 32, 73, 75–8, 83, 91, 161, 173–5, 197 Robic, Louise, 100, 102, 104, 106

Rocher, Guy, 84–5, 156 Rouleau, Suzette, 164 Rosenberg, Michael, 329 Roy, Bernard, 252, 282, 285, 287, 305 Roy, Charles, 94 Roy, Jean-Louis, 146 Roy, Michel, 9–11, 20, 23, 25, 28, 38, 41–2, 47, 53, 89, 105, 152, 203, 270 Royal Bank of Canada, 293 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 15, 76 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 88 Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, 333 Russell, Peter, 311 Ryan, Blandine, 42, 68, 93, 202 Ryan, Claude, 3–12, 18–43, 45–53, 55–7, 59–68, 70–84, 86–99, 101–2, 105–10, 114–28, 130, 133–4, 138–60, 163, 165, 169, 172–3, 175–86, 188–204, 206, 208–16, 221, 227, 230, 270, 289, 296, 326, 330 Ryan, Gerry, 28, 37, 40, 51, 90, 93, 199, 202 Ryan, Madeleine, 34, 38, 50, 94, 103, 189–90, 203 Ryan, Ted, 71

Ryan, Yves, 4–6, 41, 68, 93, 150, 195, 199–200, 202, Saindon, Zoël, 92–3 St. Amant, Lucette, 22–3, 38, 49, 55–6, 61, 90–1, 106 St. Denis group. See Casgrain group St. Laurent, Bernard, 115, 325, 333 Saint-Pierre, Guy, 62, 64, 79, 90, 200–2, 204 Ste. Marie College, 174 Samson, Camil, 36, 122, 227 Saulnier, Lucien, 153–4 Sauvé, Jeanne, 35, 86, 104, 125, 170, 178, 269 Sauvé, Maurice, 86, 193 Sauvé, Paul, 219 Savard, Serge, 308–9 Sawatsky, John, 286–7 Schlesinger, James R., 237 Scott, Ian, 249, 253, 274, 278–9 Scowen, Reed, 201 Sectoral Advisory Groups on International Trade (sagit), 290 Segal, Hugh, 287, 338–9 Sharp, Mitchell, 149 Shoyama, Tommy, 124 Siddon, Tom, 324, 326 Sihota, Moe, 339 Simard, Andrée, 219–20. See also Bourassa, Andrée Simard, Édouard, 220 Simard, Joseph, 220

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362 Index Simard, Orise, 220 Simpson, Jeffrey, 314 Sirros, Christos, 201 Social Credit, 246 Social Research Group, 9, 85, 147, 172, 184 Soleil, Le, 9, 189, 233, 330 som, 342 Sommet de la Francophonie. See Francophonie, La Sorecom, 184, 189, 192, 231, 235 SovereigntyAssociation, 95–6, 105, 111, 113, 122, 162–3, 167, 178, 223, 307, 335 Spector, Norman, 248, 251–5, 262, 267–9, 276, 280–1, 287, 291 Spicer, Keith, 336 Stanfield, Robert, 41, 150, 158 Stevens, Geoffrey, 129 Sûrété du Québec (sq), 324–6, 334 Swinton, Katherine, 311 Task Force on Canadian Unity, 22, 97 Tassé, Roger, 123, 278, 309 Taylor, Charles, 148 Tellier, Paul, 123, 130, 304 Thatcher, Margaret, 208, 302 Thorsell, William, 314 Tobin, Brian, 310 Toronto Star, The, 9,

92, 154, 247, 269, 277, 297 Toynbee, Arnold, 48 Transport Canada, 131 Tremblay, André, 249, 338 Tremblay, Arthur, 130, 163, 248 Tremblay, Michel, 213 Triple-E Senate, 252, 335, 337–8 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 7, 9, 17, 23–4, 27, 41, 62, 65, 78–9, 83–5, 87, 94–7, 107, 116, 118–19, 121–9, 131, 134, 138, 141–73, 175, 178–80, 182, 185–7, 190–2, 198, 204, 211, 218–19, 223, 225–6, 236, 246, 249–51, 254, 268–78, 282–3, 285, 289, 295–7, 310, 323, 339 Turcotte, Cardinal Jean-Claude, 343–4 Turner, John, 174, 225, 269, 274, 289, 293 tv5, 288 Union Nationale, 7, 11, 74, 77, 109, 184, 189, 217–18, 222–3, 236, 297 United Auto Workers, 128 Université du Québec, 175 Université de Sherbrooke, 175 University of Geneva, 47, 57

University of Montreal, 22, 76, 163, 174–5, 209, 213, 219, 323, 341 University of Ottawa, 22, 220, 227, 309 University of Toronto, 85, 145, 278, 311 University of Victoria, 124 Valade, Claude, 108 Vancouver Formula, 186–7, 198, 250 Vander Zalm, Bill, 247, 255 Van Dusen, Tom, 268 Vastel, Michel, 246 Veilleux, Gérard, 123 Victoria Formula, 186–7, 211, 250, 341 Vigneault, Gilles, 182 Wagner, Claude, 29, 135, 223 War Measures Act, 153–4 Watt, Charlie, 170 Watts, Ron, 248 Wells, Clyde, 297, 299, 306, 308, 310–20, 323 Whelan, Eugene, 17, 188 Wilhelmy, Diane, 249, 278, 281, 338–9 Willson, Thomas, 253 Wilson, Lawrence, 31–2, 106–7 Wilson, Michael, 319 Wilson, Woodrow, 49

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363 Index Wilson-Smith, Anthony, 343 Winters, Robert, 79 Wojtyla, Karol

(Pope John Paul II), 214 World Economic Forum. See Davos

York University, 311 Yvettes, 100–4, 107–8, 115–16, 128, 178, 182

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364 Index