Because they had never been evenly distributed, even good times added to the strains of Confederation. In the quarter-century after the war, most of Canada could only envy the easy affluence of southern Ontario and Quebec. In the 1970s, that changed. The energy boom drew wealth westward untU Alberta boasted the highest average income in the country. For Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, reports of rich offshore resources promised comparable wealth in a matter of years. It was the central provinces that now faced an anxious future. Soaring energy costs, obsolete industrial technologies, and foreign competition closed factories and wiped out tens of thousands of the well-paid jobs that once had sustained the consumer revolution. The American industries that once had devoured Ontario nickel and Quebec iron ore had been reduced to stark, silent landmarks in the rust-belt states. What did the Auto Pact matter if most Canadians now preferred German or Japanese cars?
Forced to satisfy a voracious public appetite for education and for the miraculous cures of high-tech health care, some provinces braved the defiance of militant teacher and health-care workers. In the spring of 1972,200,000 Quebec public-sector workers spearheaded the largest general strike in Canadian history. The “Common Front” campaign ended in violence, defiance, and the jailing of labour leaders. Ontario hospital workers defied the government to arrest them. In 1975, resentful voters almost defeated an Ontario regime that had lasted a third of a century.
Having purchased a 1974 majority by lavish spending and subsidies, the federal Liberals blamed the resulting inflation for Canada’s economic malaise and decided that, after all, it could be curbed by domestic policy. Having denounced Tory promises of wage and price controls as economic folly, the Prime Minister announced his own “restraints” on giving weekend 1975. An Anti-Inflation Board froze union bargaining power for three years. Labour’s rage, expressed in court battles, demonstrations, and a million-member walkout in October 1975, had no effect on a government sustained by the courts and most public opinion.
Yet inflation and strikes were symptoms of deeper problems. Economic nationalists renewed old charges that an economy based on foreign-owned branch plants was inherently inefficient and imitative. Critics from left and right demanded an industrial strategy for Canada, though it was never clear, amid the rancorous voices, what precise strategy would simultaneously satisfy labour, capital, environmentalists, and regional patriots. Robert Bourassa’s bid for a “profitable federalism” struggled against inflation, nervous investors, an increasingly radical labour movement, and media opinion leaders who had long since espoused the captivating dream of independence. In 1973, Quebec was polarized between the increasingly business-oriented Liberals and a resolutely independentist Parti Quebecois. In a two-party fight, almost a third of the votes had given the pq just a handful of seats. The minority was unreconciled; the majority felt uncertain of its mandate.
In Ottawa and beyond, Bourassa’s reputation as a defender of federalism had been hurt by the October Crisis. A year later, when Trudeau summoned provincial premiers to Victoria to discuss the patriation and reform of the venerable British North America Act, Bourassa should have been jubilant. Forty years earlier, Quebec and Ontario had scuttled Ottawa-born arrangements to bring Canada’s constitution home from London because they would not have a veto on future amendments. At Victoria, Trudeau offered Bourassa and Ontario’s Bill Davis that right, plus most of Quebec’s traditional demands. On the flight home, however, Bourassa learned of a waiting storm. In Montreal, Claude Ryan of Le Devoir had whipped up a nationalist furor because Bourassa had not won everything the powerful editor had demanded. Bourassa’s self-confidence wilted and the Victoria Charter died, as did Trudeau’s respect for his protege.
This might have mattered less if Quebec had prospered. Bourassa’s prize achievement was a vast hydroelectric development on James Bay. Critics denounced the financial risks, the environmental damage, even the generous settlement with the Native people of the region, but it took a violent rampage by workers in the winter of 1975 to turn the project politically sour. An inquiry showed that the government had counted on union goons to keep labour peace. Montreal’s staging of the 1976 Olympic Games left as bitter a taste. Canadian athletes won few medals; an African boycott and tight security blighted any potential euphoria, and Montrealers were left with an unfinished stadium, too many hotels, and mass unemployment. Mayor Jean Drapeau had boasted that there could no more be a deficit than he could have a baby. Cartoonist Terry
Triumphant young people on the night of November 15, 1976. For the first time, a party pledged to seek Quebec’s independence had swept to power. Only four years later, Quebecers showed that while they wanted Rene Levesque and the Parti Quebecois, they also wanted Confederation. But by 1985 they did not even want the pq. On May 20— referendum night in Montreal—the Quebec premier acknowledged defeat.
Mosher depicted Drapeau phoning Dr. Henry Morgenthaler, a well-known doctor specializing in abortions.
Economic difficulties intertwined with Quebec’s unresolved language dispute. Nationalists claimed that it was English-run businesses that issued layoff notices or had no room for the swelling torrent of university-trained Quebecois. Bourassa’s compromise solution, Bill 22, satisfied no one. English-speaking parents were indignant that six-year-olds would be tested on their right to be educated in English; nationalists insisted that only a unUingual French-speaking Quebec would be tolerable. In the spring of 1976, a tiny dispute suddenly churned into a hurricane of emotion. Ottawa announced that French would join English as an official traffic-control language in Quebec skies. Faced with storm of protests from English-Canadian pilots, controllers, and politicians, the government backed down: a year’s delay was necessary. The interval gave nationalists the issue they wanted. When Bourassa led his battered government to the polls on November 15,1976, Liberal support had evaporated. The Parti Quebecois garnered only 41 per cent of the vote, but it was enough to grow from 7 to 72 seats. The Liberals kept 28. Nine years after his break with the Liberals, Rene Levesque and the separatists had triumphed.
For a moment, Canadians were stunned. They had hardly imagined such an outcome. Ironically, a prime minister who had presided over regional disintegration now became Canada’s saviour. “I say to you with all the certainty I can command,” Trudeau told Canadians, “that Canada’s unity will not be fractured.” By February 1977, half the Canadian electorate would have voted for him. Then, slowly, the country relaxed. Once in power, Rene Levesque postponed the independence referendum in favour of popular reforms more typical of an ndp government. The Parti Quebecois abandoned the folly of examining toddlers, but its own language law, BUI 101, made French the only legal and also the only visible language of Quebec, from government forms to bUlboards and menus. If Anglo-Quebecers were squeezed out of their province, they made room for ambitious Quebecois. If they stayed, they would work in French, whether in the stock exchange or on factory assembly lines. ChUdren of newcomers, even from Alberta, would be taught only in French.
Outside Quebec, few Canadians worried about the harshness of Bill 101. The province’s English-speaking minority had never commanded much sympathy. A task force was sent out to find a national response to Quebec’s discontents. It returned, like the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, dizzy from the myriad grievance-mongers and eager to endorse constitutional schemes that satisfied no one. For the most part, Canadians soon felt free again to denounce a federal government that kept causing them More pain than pleasure. In the summer of 1978, Trudeau came home from a seven-nation economic summit at the West German capital of Bonn, primed for a fresh assault on inflation and a growing deficit. The restraint program was scrapped; its replacement would be the new old-fashioned monetarism: high interest rates, cuts in public spending, the certainty of mounting unemployment. Few rejoiced.
Canadians had had almost enough of their philosopher-prince. They admired Trudeau in crises, sympathized with his dignified endurance of a collapsed marriage, but resented his aloof disdain for their daily concerns. A government of power-hungry officials and mediocre ministers had been too long in power. All that remained to the Liberals was to spread the impression that the alternatives were worse. Canadians admired the dogged decency of the ndp’s Ed Broadbent, but only a stubborn fifth of the electorate ever endorsed his party. In 1976, the Tories had replaced Robert Stanfield with Joe Clark, a pleasant young Albertan whom no one disliked. After watching Clark struggle with his fractious party, few respected him either. Clark’s weaknesses could, however, be disguised by image makers; the Liberal record could not. On May 22,1979, Quebec voters were solidly loyal to Trudeau; elsewhere, Canadians remembered falling incomes, lost jobs, and a government that seemed to have forgotten them. The Tories emerged with 136 seats, 8 short of a majority. It was a frail mandate for change.
Voters soon had second thoughts. Clark took a leisurely summer to organize his government. Amid growing panic at an impending Quebec referendum, the Iranian oil price shock, and interest rates soaring to 15 and 20 per cent, Clark’s caution began to look like hapless indecision. Tory support tumbled. In November, Trudeau’s resignation from public life seemed to promise the new government more time. A budget, tougher in rhetoric than substance, tried to satisfy Alberta’s oil magnates at the expense of Ontario energy consumers. Peter Lougheed was not appeased; BiU Davis, Ontario’s Conservative premier, was furious. Liberals took courage from the polls and backed an ndp motion to reject the budget. Amazingly, the Conservatives did nothing to avert defeat. As Canadians faced an unexpected mid-winter election, Clark was confident that he would repeat Diefenbaker’s wintertime sweep of 1958. Leaderless, the Liberals felt a momentary chill. Then, suddenly, Trudeau was back, armed for his apotheosis. On February 18,1980, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes gave him back his majority: Liberals, 147, Tories 103, NDPers 32.
There was much to do. The crisis of Quebec in Confederation had brought Trudeau to Ottawa in 1965, and it remained his unfinished business. At times, the world of summit conferences, arms races, and cruel North-South disparities had de-
In 1976 Ed Broadbent won the New Democratic Party leadership, and Rosemary Brown came second. The member of the B. C. legislature was the first woman and the first black to seek a party leadership. In the 1970s, it no longer seemed extraordinary.
Fleeted Trudeau’s interest, but the bread-and-butter preoccupations of Canadian businessmen, unionists, and farmers had consistently bored him.
Now, in his last mandate, Trudeau was finally free to do what he could and to leave history to judge.
Levesque had planned his referendum for May 20,1980, with a question continually market-tested until it could not fail. Surely most Quebecers would approve a mandate to negotiate sovereignty-association—with a further chance to vote on the outcome. The “Non” side, led by Claude Ryan—once the austere nationalist editor who bedevilled Robert Bourassa and now, ironically, his successor—was a feeble coalition, preoccupied by academic schemes to decentralize federalism. Trudeau ignored Ryan. Instead, he sent Jean Chretien, a popular minister and self-proclaimed “little guy from Shawinigan” to galvanize opposition to Levesque. Barely aware that its own Bill 101 had taken the heat out of Quebecers’ fears for survival, the pq made error after error. It bored its own supporters, insulted opponents, and worried the undecided. In a heavy turnout, the “Nons” triumphed, 60 per cent to 40 per cent.
In his referendum speeches, Trudeau had promised Quebec and Canada a new constitutional deal. Though he had once warned that constitutional reform would open a Pandora’s box, Trudeau now believed that patriation and an entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms would be the enduring monument his political career had lacked. National relief at the referendum’s outcome and the embarrassment of a constitution that still had to be amended in Britain would help Trudeau to his goal. Through the summer of 1980, Jean Chretien and Saskatchewan Attorney-General Roy Romanow crossed Canada, urging a package of constitutional proposals on provincial premiers.
In September, when Trudeau and the premiers met in Ottawa in a televised specTacle, it was soon apparent that the premiers were not converted. Only Ontario’s Bill Davis and New Brunswick’s Richard Hatfield shared Trudeau’s priority; their colleagues believed that provincial vetoes could stall proceedings until regional demands and personal priorities had been satisfied. A puckish Levesque took pleasure from the renewed constitutional impasse.
He reckoned without Trudeau. Early in October, the Prime Minister sliced through half a century of constitutional dithering. Whether the provinces liked it or not, Ottawa would act alone to bring the constitution home, give it a made-in-Canada amending formula, and adopt a charter of basic rights and freedoms. Davis and Hatfield promptly approved. So did the ndp’s Ed Broadbent, after he had persuaded Trudeau to add stronger guarantees to his charter and protection for the West’s resources. For their part, Levesque, Lougheed, and most other premiers were almost beside themselves at Trudeau’s audacity. In Parliament, Joe Clark used the dispute to rally his demoralized Tories. Lawyers and a host of experts, real or imputed, joined the fray. As the Canadian economy slid into its worst recession since the 1930s, Government, Opposition, and occasional ill-informed British parliamentarians belaboured each other on issues that most Canadians found arcane or irrelevant. Provinces filed challenges in the courts. Clergy, feminists. Native leaders, the disabled, and a host of groups fought for their own special places in the emerging constitution. Dissenting premiers met at Vancouver to devise their own complex amending formula, with no province having a veto. Even Levesque approved, confident that
Beginning in the 1960s provincial social workers, guided by non-Indian views of child care, began to remove Native children from their reserves at an alarming rate. As the proportion of Native children in welfare care grew to five times the national average,
Indians began to insist that they have jurisdiction over child care; “Young people are the hope and life-blood of our nations, and their removal strikes at the very heart of our culture and heritage” (Restigouche Band,
1983).
The Vancouver Charter would go nowhere. In Ottawa, constitutional debate paralysed Parliament.
In September 1981, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on the validity of the Trudeau initiative: what the government had done, most judges agreed, was legal but defied convention. Since there was no precedent for patriation and therefore no convention, the verdict was nonsense, as Chief justice Bora Laskin politely advised his brethren, but the decision forced Trudeau to make another attempt at consensus. The premiers gathered in Ottawa for another seemingly fruitless meeting. Then, after midnight on November 5,1981, Chretien, Romanow, and Ontario’s attorney-general, Roy McMurtry, wrestled a compromise into shape. Trudeau’s Charter of Rights would be combined with the premiers’Vancouver amending formula. The premiers were woken and summoned to the former railway station that served as Ottawa’s conference centre—all but Levesque, sound asleep across the river in Hull (now Gatineau). When he awoke, the deed had been done. The midnight compromise, embellished with clauses covering provincial control of resources, fiscal sharing, and other small changes of federal-provincial wrangling, had become a constitutional document. Quebec’s historic veto, blithely sacrificed at Vancouver, was gone. So were many of the provisions women and Native people had fought for. After further frenzied lobbying, gender equality and an undefined commitment to aboriginal rights reappeared. Quebec’s veto did not. On a cold rainy April 17, 1982, Queen Elizabeth gave her royal assent to a Constitution Act that few Canadians had ever read and even fewer understood. Pierre Elliott Trudeau had made his mark on history. The lawyers and judges who would give meaning to the turgid phrases of the Act and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms had acquired a vast new power. Only time would tell how much power remained to the elected members of Parliament and the provincial legislatures.
World History
