In retrospect, Pierre Elliott Trudeau should have retired in the wake of the constitutionsigning ceremony. The outcome of the Quebec referendum made him dispensable. The Constitution Act guaranteed him the historical niche his long political career had otherwise failed to earn. The liberation era, which he had once personified, had degenerated into a selfish conservatism. Above all, by 1982, Canada was mired in the kind of economic crisis in which Trudeau showed to least advantage.
The stagflation of the 1970s had undermined a post-war faith in the government as an economic manager. Beginning in 1978, average real incomes in Canada began to decline, a phenomenon masked by a surge of double-income families. Such families grew scarcer as divorce rates rose, and mother-led families became almost synonymous with poverty. Long before American voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, “New Deal” reformism was in eclipse, even among Democrats. In 1979, British voters elected the most unabashedly right-wing government since the 1920s. Americans followed suit with Reagan.
In Canada, too, a mixture of anxiety and self-interest curdled the liberal optimism of the post-war years. The baby boomers, the “big generation,” had evolved into a selfinterested consumerism. Personal fitness became an industry. As public opinion turned against smoking, cigarette manufacturers and tobacco farmers suffered. Middle-aged consumers switched to wine and exotic brands of beer. Driving under the influence became a scandal. Pro - and anti-abortionists argued their cases without charity or concession. Conservatives demanded rigid school curricula and testing, curbs on unpopular opinions, and (unsuccessfully) a return to the capital punishment Canada had abolished in 1964. Feminists split on whether pornography or unfettered free speech mattered more. Students in the 1980s espoused conservative causes, competed for marks, and switched to career-oriented programs. Polls reported that Canadians considered “Big Government” their worst enemy, with “Big Labour” close behind. One of the few successful government initiatives of the 1970s spread across Canada in the 1980s. Initiated as a “voluntary tax” by Jean Drapeau to help fund his Olympic ambitions, lotteries created effortless millionaires and political pin money for provincial governments. The post-war faith that hard work plus economic growth would fulfil any reasonable dream ended with prayers for luck in a nationwide Lotto 6/49 draw and prizes of $10 million and more.
In Quebec, the 1980 referendum result seemed to bury nationalism. When Levesque cried betrayal over Quebec’s defeat in the constitutional negotiation, he encountered as much ridicule as sympathy. In truth, his own language law, Bill 101, had helped undermine the separatist cause. Who would worry about English domination when the language itself had virtually disappeared from sight and the jobs of departing Anglophones were available for ambitious Quebecois? The language of business in Montreal was now French, but the boardroom ideology was as conservative as ever. Fiaving embraced secularism and democratic socialism, Quebec opinion leaders now claimed to have “le gout des affaires"’ The pq itself looked more and more like the old Union Na-tionale. Re-elected in 1981, after Quebecers again rejected the Liberals, this time under the uncharismatic Claude Ryan, the pq reacted to the economic recession by stripping public employees of their rich pre-referendum pay increases. Teachers and civil servants, once the militant core of separatism, could look for no relief from the Liberals.
In Ottawa, the re-elected Liberals initially ignored the rightward trend. Party insiders blamed their own 1979 defeat on the government’s monetarism and cutbacks. While Trudeau had forged ahead with his constitutional plans, colleagues attempted to deliver on election promises of tax reform and a “made in Canada” energy policy. Allan MacEachen used his first budget to plug a long list of cherished tax loopholes. Joe Clark’s blunders had included a threat to dismantle Petro-Canada, the government-owned oil company. To eastern voters, any Canadian-controlled agency that could protect them from Arabs, Albertans, and Esso was popular. When the National Energy Program (nep) was proclaimed by Trudeau late in 1981, Petro-Canada became the centrepiece of a drive for Canadian ownership, self-sufficiency, and abolition of the tax concessions that had filled oil company coffers. From the Beaufort Sea to Newfoundland’s offshore Hibernia deposits, the government itself would finance frontier oil exploration while taking a share of fresh discoveries.
Ten years earlier, both tax reform and the nep might have succeeded. In 1981, they inspired outrage in the West and among business leaders. Under furious assault, the government promptly unplugged most of the tax loopholes and forgot about reform. On the nep, Ottawa was firm. Still waiting for his cut after oil prices tripled in 1979, Alberta’s Peter Lougheed shut down two giant oU-sands conversion projects and twice reduced supplies to eastern Canada. By the fall of 1982, Ottawa had settled with Edmonton, though the oil companies were left out. Executives cancelled investment plans, shifted their capital to the more sympathetic environment of Reagan’s America, and reminded Washington of their displeasure with the folks up in Canada. Hundreds of Canadian companies, born or bred in the oil boom, either folded or took their drill rigs south in the hope of American business. Floods of workers, drawn from the East by reports of Alberta riches, turned around and went home. Others stayed to join the local hordes of unemployed. In 1979, Alberta had boasted virtual full employment— 96.3 per cent. By 1983, one in ten of the province’s workers was hunting for a job. The western boom had bust. Bitter Albertans knew whom to blame.
More than the nep, it was the recession that punctured the resource boom, dragging down world oil prices despite all the opec cartel could do. The protectionism of new trading blocs, deepening Third World poverty, and panic by bankers who had loaned not wisely but too well, contributed to the squeeze. For a time, high interest rates fed inflation in Canada, reaching a post-war high of 22.5 per cent in 1981. Then, amid bankruptcies, mass unemployment, and a crumpling national economy, rates fell. Few noticed. In 1979, 836,000 Canadians had been looking for work, the greatest share being in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. By 1982, the monthly average was
1,314,000 and rising. A fifth of would-be workers under twenty-five had no job. The toll was highest in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Quebec, but the collapse of world markets for coal, lumber, and paper left one British Columbia worker in six unemployed. In constant dollars, Canada’s gnp tumbled 4 per cent in 1982, the first such setback since the 1930s. A federal deficit that had been adding a worrisome $12 to 13 billion a year to the national debt through the 1970s began a stratospheric climb as revenues stagnated and the cost of welfare soared. In 1982, the federal deficit was $23.99 billion; by 1984, it was $35.79 billion, higher per capita than anything the Reagan administration had imposed on Americans and the world. In response, the Canadian dollar slid gracelessly from 93 American cents in 1981 to an historic low of 70 cents by the end of 1985.
It was easy in the prevailing mood to pin the blame for economic disaster on Ottawa. Yet in the name of free-enterprise principles, British and American working people suffered comparable hardships. In Canada, bad luck and bad management dogged the NEP. The sinking of a huge oil rig, the Ocean Ranger, in a storm off Newfoundland, with the loss of all its crew, underlined the costly risks of offshore oil. Dome Petroleum, a joyous collector of NEP grants for its Beaufort Sea explorations, coUapsed
In the recession of the 1980s more than a million Canadians, most of them young, lost their jobs. Resource industries, hit by falling world prices, were most affected. This young couple seeks assistance and advice from a union help centre in British Columbia.
For Native peoples the age of “space” is long past; they must fight to preserve their cultures in a technological world. From the North has come a new and distinctive style of sculpture and printmaking, bringing income, recognition, and a renewed sense of identity to the Inuit. Pudlo working on stone block at the Art Centre, Cape Dorset, N. W.T., August 1981.
Snowmobiles may be “recreational vehicles” in southern Canada, but for the congregation of this Anglican church in Cape Dorset, some 240 kilometres (150 miles) below the Arctic Circle, they are just sensible transport.
Amidst soaring costs and tumbling oil prices. In 1983, when the government finally abolished the Crow’s Nest rate, an historic subsidy for prairie grain exporters, it stoked up the anger of western wheat farmers. Even
The Raven and the First Men, a 1980 carving by Haida sculptor, printmaker, and goldsmith Bill Reid. This contemporary version of an ancient creation myth symbolizes the rebirth of NorthWest Coast Indian art in the last four decades. Photo by W. McLennan.
The “6&5 plan,” the Trudeau government’s plan to restrict all the wages and prices it could control, made enemies without achieving its goal. The post-1981 recession made 6-and-5 per cent wage increases seem generous when millions of private-sector workers faced wage cuts and layoffs.
Good times had pushed Canada deeper into the American orbit; bad times accelerated the pull. lapan had long since replaced Britain and even all of Europe as Canada’s second trading partner. Japanese cars, cameras, television sets, tape recorders; South Korean jogging shoes and sweat pants; and much else that defined consumerism in the 1980s had long since supplanted goods that Canadians or even their neighbours had once produced. Corporations that were struggling back from layoffs and nearbankruptcy looked to Japan for robotics, microchips, and management philosophy, but only after their American head offices and business gurus approved. The United States was still twelve times larger than Japan as a supplier to Canada and twenty times bigger as a Canadian market.
At the depth of the recession in 1982, the Trudeau government appointed the Royal Commission on the Economic Union, headed by his former finance minister
Part of an international movement by popular musicians, “Tears Are Not Enough” was recorded to raise funds for victims of famine in Africa. Among those who sang on the record and performed on the popular video were (top row) Murray McLauchlan, Liberty Silver, Mike Reno, Robert Charlebois, Ronnie Hawkins, Corey Hart; (middle row) Burton Cummings, Veronique Beliveau, Bryan Adams, Claude Dubois; (front row) Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray, Carroll Baker, Geddy Lee, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young.
And potential successor, Donald S. Macdonald. Seemingly every prominent economist in the country was recruited to produce a study. Their influence and the mood of the times persuaded the commission, perhaps to its own surprise, to emerge squarely in favour of closer economic links, even free trade, with the United States. And why not? A so-called “third option” of enhanced trade with Europe and the Pacific Rim had won little practical support from Canadian business and virtually none from the branch-plant managers or their bosses. American markets beckoned. So did American culture. Satellites and vcRs outflanked the cultural nationalism of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (crtc) and fed a Canadian appetite for American mass entertainment.
Post-war Canadians had hoped for something more than a continental embrace. A handful of able officials and its own natural wealth had secured for Canada a visible measure of independence at a time when the United States dominated the world. Paradoxically, Canada’s dependence seemed to grow as American economic stature
And power worldwide diminished. External Affairs officialdom proliferated, but innovative genius had retreated to familiar platitudes about peace, collective security, and moderation. Becoming the junior member of the Group of Seven major industrialized countries in 1978 only added to the output of free-enterprise platitudes. External aid, expanded enormously since the 1952 Commonwealth Conference in Colombo, was a brave but lonely and frustrated vestige of Canada’s post-war idealism. Nowhere was the stasis in policy and the inflation of bureaucracy more apparent than in defence. More generals and admirals than Canada had needed in 1945 presided over 82,000 men and women and a largely obsolete collection of ships, guns, tanks, and aircraft. By the mid-1980s, Canada’s most modern warships were four destroyers ordered in the Pearson years. While the forces and their effectiveness diminished, their host of commitments, from Kashmir to NATO’s northern flank, had grown steadily.
Despite acknowledged brilliance and a veteran’s longevity among world leaders, Trudeau gave little of the commitment to Canada’s international role that he devoted to its internal conflicts of language, culture, and constitution. Trudeau had little respect for the mediocrities, from Nixon to Reagan, whom American voters sent to the White House during his career, and he received none in return. Trudeau had spurned NATO in 1969, discovered its usefulness in the 1970s, and finally, in a sudden bid to be acknowledged a peacemaker, denounced NATO’s Cold War preoccupations. The Third World and “North South dialogue” were remembered and forgotten with equal ease. Prime-ministerial caprice did not help Canada’s influence in the world.
World status worried Canadians less than the state of the economy and their own livelihood. Within a year of his triumphant re-election, Trudeau’s support was crumbling. Joe Clark’s admirers credited the Tories’ stout resistance to Trudeau’s constitutional proposals; Clark’s Tory critics wondered whether voters could ever support someone they had rejected so contemptuously in 1980. By 1983, they had manoeuvred Clark into putting his leadership to a public challenge. At Ottawa, on June 11, Diefenbaker loyalists, right-wingers, and resentful patronage seekers coalesced behind an affable, outgoing Montreal lawyer who had come surprisingly close to winning in 1976. Brian Mulroney had never sought elected office, but he was charming, Catholic, colloquial in both official languages, and comfortable with the power brokers of business of either political party. If Mulroney’s major public achievement as president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada was turning Schefferville into a ghost town, he had merely obeyed his American employers. Moreover, the settlement was generous enough
Canada’s newspapers used to claim to reserve their bias for the editorial pages, but would the Globe and Mail have portrayed their chosen candidate with forks playing the role of devil’s horns? In the Trudeau years, John Turner had been a business hero. But by 1984, business leaders—and the publishers and editors who served them—favoured Brian Mulroney. Canadians got the message.
To satisfy local unions. By the 1980s, government, not business, had become the public’s preferred villain.
Tories had no illusions that Canadians pined for a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan. When British Columbia’s Bill Bennett celebrated his 1983 re-election with an unheralded assault on social services and public-sector unions, Mulroney solemnly proclaimed that, to him, universal social programs were a “sacred trust.” When Manitoba Tories raised a public clamour about an ndp government’s attempt to provide bilingual services, Mulroney solemnly disavowed them. Conservative support grew, even draining votes from the ndp. The Liberals were undismayed: they had their own saviour.
After a hurriedly improvised world peace mission failed to raise his stock, Trudeau strode into a snowstorm on February 29,1984, and made up his mind to resign. Most Liberal insiders immediately coalesced behind John Turner. In the ten years since he had quit as finance minister, Turner had built business connections as a Toronto corporation lawyer. He had also made no secret of his distaste for Trudeau’s policies and his contempt for Jean Chretien, the nep, and much else that had happened since his departure. With Turner in the race. Liberal fortunes rose. So did Chretien’s, campaigning as Trudeau’s unofficial heir and as a populist hero. On June 16, the final Liberal convention ballot pitted two rival versions of Liberalism against each other. Turner prevailed, and a honeymoon of favourable opinion polls enticed him into an immediate general election.
Never in Canadian history had a party or politician fallen faster. Trapped into rewarding a host of Trudeau cronies with patronage plums, a stuttering Turner had to confess in a television debate with Mulroney, “I had no choice.” Ill informed and oddly awkward after his years in the business elite, Turner also had no organization, no policies, and, after a few weeks, little money or support. Brian Mulroney, lavishly financed, furiously organized, and smoothly presented, coasted on an election landslide that seeped and then deluged across Quebec. So complete and certain was the Tory triumph even before election day that defecting supporters raced back to the ndp to save a likeable Ed Broadbent and his party from total eclipse. Mulroney’s victory on September 4 matched Diefenbaker’s in 1958: 211 Tories to a mere 40 Liberals and 30 New Democrats. Turner’s election in a wealthy Vancouver constituency owed more to compassion than conviction.
Four times. Conservatives won power in twentieth-century Canada only to fall victim to war or economic disaster. The fifth occasion gave Brian Mulroney the mandate for the unequivocal promise he had made in his campaign: to restore a sense of community to Canadians. With eight out of ten provinces under Progressive Conservative or sympathetic governments, it was a promise he seemed able to keep. There was more, of course, that he and his lieutenants and business backers wanted: an assault on the federal deficit, “privatization” of a host of federal activities and enterprises, a tax system that would provide incentives for the wealthy to get wealthier. Despite its massive mandate and overwhelming parliamentary majority, the new government found that some old political rules had not changed. Regions and provinces had been unanimous for Mulroney, but old differences soon resurfaced. The prosperity that slowly returned to Canada, even before the 1984 election, favoured the urban, industrial regions of central Canada, leaving the vast hinterland regions hurt and hurting. The sudden emergence of the issue of free trade offered some Canadians a panacea, but to a host of protected ventures, from brewing to publishing, it was a nightmare. Deficit cutting was not much easier; outrage from the elderly killed a proposal in the government’s first budget to end indexing for old age security. A prime minister too fond of his cronies and a party with a thirty-one-year thirst for patronage helped make embarrassing headlines. Like the Liberals, the Conservatives rediscovered the painful trade-offs of regional politics. In 1986, a $1.8 billion contract to repair fighter aircraft went to Montreal, not to the lower bidder in Winnipeg. Quebec had more political leverage than Manitoba. Western voters, faithful to the Tories during the long Liberal years, felt betrayed.
A Canadian ice-breaker, the John A. Macdonald, ploughs through heavy ice in Eureka Sound. In the 1980s, as the U. S. challenged Canada’s claim to the Arctic, some Canadians began to wonder whether they had left their sovereignty over the vast North a little too much to chance.
At midterm, opinion polls showed the Mulroney government lagging even behind the NDP. Within two years of the Tory sweep, the provincial political pendulum had begun to swing back. The pq’s decision to put its independence plank into storage helped Robert Bourassa take Quebec for the Liberals on December 2,1986, by 99 seats to 23. A host of issues, from a lurch to the right to a Conservative decision to allow full funding for Catholic public schools, ended Ontario’s forty-two-year Conservative rule in May 1985. A written agreement with Bob Rae to adopt ndp policies allowed David Peterson to form the first Liberal government in the province since 1943. Joe Ghiz, a lawyer of Lebanese origins, won Prince Edward Island for the Liberals in May 1986. Only in the West did Conservative or sympathetic premiers hold their provinces.
Yet Mulroney was shrewder than his critics imagined. To replace the Liberals as the natural majority party, he cultivated their old stronghold, Quebec, with contacts, patronage, and as much concern for language and culture as rednecks in his caucus would allow. In the 1984 campaign, Mulroney had promised to succeed where Trudeau had failed: he would bring Quebec into the constitution “with honour and enthusiasm.” Bourassa’s return was his opportunity. After his government had substantially reduced its demands, two marathon bargaining sessions, with all the provincial premiers at Meech Lake on April 30 and in Ottawa on June 3,1987, produced a unanimous accord. In future, provinces would submit lists of potential senators and Supreme Court justices for the prime minister to make his pick. Ottawa would share responsibility for immigration policy with the provinces, and provide full compensation for provinces that Opted out of federal programs. Above all, Quebec would be recognized as a “distinct society.” Conscious of the achievement, both Turner and Broadbent promptly pledged their parties’ support. Critics checked with the former prime minister and, encouraged by Trudeau’s boUing rage, began to muster their forces. Soon after the Meech Lake Accord, a swirling controversy over Premier Richard Hatfield’s private life cost New Brunswick Conservatives every seat as Frank McKenna’s Liberals swept the province on October 13,1987. Howard Pawley, head of Manitoba’s lonely ndp government, fell six months later, a victim of voter discontent over bilingualism and high premiums for government-run car insurance. McKenna and Manitoba’s new Liberal opposition leader, Sharon Carstairs, denounced the Meech accord; as a minority premier, Manitoba’s Gary Filmon chose to be prudent. Two signatories of the Meech Lake Accord were gone and, if the constitution had hardly been an issue in their downfall, it would not be unaffected.
World History
