Pierre Elliott Trudeau (17 page)

In Quebec, of course, as with most things, the accord played differently. Chrétien’s night of “horse-trading” would come to be referred to, without apparent irony, as “The Night of the Long Knives,” a reference to Hitler’s famous purge of his political enemies.

“Every one of them hated the goddamn son of a bitch,” Lévesque said afterwards of the other premiers. “For their own particular reasons. But none of them had a vision of politics that couldn’t be turned by a couple of cocktails.”

Eventually, the constitutional accord would take its place next to the October Crisis as one of the great perfidies committed against the Quebec people by the traitor Trudeau. In the case of the accord, however, the charge had much greater
cause. Lévesque had had a mandate from Quebecers to negotiate change, to hold Trudeau to his promise, and Trudeau had run roughshod over it. In agreeing to an accord that reduced Quebec’s powers, whether he did so out of expedience or pure desperation, he had betrayed his promise of 1980. Trudeau afterwards played with the numbers to suggest, as the
Globe
editorial had, that the federal Liberals’ strength in Quebec constituted support for the accord, but the success of the separatist Bloc Québécois in later years was surely fed by Quebecers’ lingering sense of betrayal over the constitution and their loss of trust in their federal representatives. While it was the breakaway Conservative Lucien Bouchard who formed the Bloc in a split with Brian Mulroney over Meech Lake, it would be the federal Liberals who would most feel the effects, being no longer able to rely comfortably on their Quebec base.

In the immediate aftermath of the talks, however, Lévesque took it on the nose in Quebec as much as he did in the rest of Canada. Claude Ryan raked him over the coals in the National Assembly, saying that far from being the victim of “diabolical machinations” among the anglophone premiers, he had been done in by “the hopeless contradiction of a provincial sovereignist negotiating for renewed federalism.” Meanwhile, his own party was pressing him for
either a new election or a new referendum. “Il m’a fourré,” Lévesque had said in tears on the plane back to Quebec, just as Ryan had said before him. He screwed me. But no one got points for being outwitted. Two native sons, two titans, had clashed, and Trudeau had come out the winner. Lévesque was never to recover.

“If Trudeau had become a separatist in the 60s,” journalist Denise Bombardier remarked, “Quebec would be independent by now.”

Of course, Trudeau was Trudeau because he hadn’t. It was the one time, perhaps, that he had truly gone against the current, almost alone among his set in bucking the nationalist trend of the Quiet Revolution. It was not an easy turning, leading not only to lifelong rifts with people like his old mentor and friend from Brébeuf, François Hertel, but to a feeling of betrayal among a younger generation who had been looking to him as their hero and who, as Quebec journalist Malcolm Reid observed, could not forgive him the “cool, assured tone” with which he distanced himself from their fiery nationalism. “How could he live in the smothering of liberty and not cry, not scream, not scribble on walls, not take to drink or dynamite?” But he had already been there and found it a dead end; it was exactly what had given birth to the “functional politics” he
had announced in the first issue of
Cité libre
and had stuck to ever since.

However cynical Trudeau became by the final years, and however much he played off his promises to achieve his own ends, there was a continuity, at least, in his vision. In
Federalism and the French Canadians,
he had reached the conclusion that “federalism has all along been a product of reason in politics. It was born of a decision by pragmatic politicians to face facts as they are, particularly by the fact of the heterogeneity of the world’s population. It is an attempt to find a rational compromise between the divergent interest-groups which history has thrown together; but it is a compromise based on the will of the people.” This had always remained for him the appeal of federalism, that it based itself not on ethnicity and emotionalism but on practicality and the common good. Trudeau may have come to this stance by way of the cauldron of his own crises of identity, but the reason he stuck with it was because it made sense. And if he had patched it together via Harvard and Harold Laski and China and the Khyber Pass, it was, in the end, a very Canadian stance.

Historian Michael Bliss, in his article “Guarding a Most Famous Stream,” has made the argument that far from being the political maverick he was often portrayed as, Trudeau
followed very much in the traditions of the prime ministers who had preceded him. “Pierre Trudeau was undeniably more abrasive, arrogant, tough, aloof, solitary, and selfcontained than traditional politicians,” he says, and

brought to the prime ministership intellectual skills, life experiences, and values different from those brought by most of his predecessors. Once in office, however, he was not as unlike them as even his own ornery reflections imply. He brokered competing interests, bought political support, and doled out patronage in the grand Canadian manner. He stood firmly on guard for Canada when it was menaced. He greatly expanded the freedoms of Canadians. In these regards he was a true inheritor of the mantles of William Lyon Mackenzie, Sir John A. Macdonald, Wilfred Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson, even John Diefenbaker. Some maverick.

Just as he had done when he was a student at Brébeuf, Trudeau had found the way in politics to marry the stance of the rebel to the slog of getting on with the job. “The truth is I work.” It was such a quintessentially Canadian senti
ment, as true of the
habitant
stock of New France and the Scots Presbyterians and Irish refugees of Upper Canada as of the First Nations running their traplines and the latter-day immigrants of every hue. Perhaps our attraction to him came exactly from this, that however different from us he seemed, however much the outsider, we sensed he was one of us. He gave the impression of adventure and change even as he affirmed the general flow of things as they were. Rebellion without risk. A very Canadian sort of rebellion. Or put differently: he showed us how to be ourselves, but to do it with style.

In the mid-1980s, I did graduate studies in Montreal with the vague intention of making myself a better, more bilingual Canadian. If I became a better Canadian, however, it was probably less from my immersion in our other official culture, which felt much more remarkably foreign than I had expected, than from my tuning in to Peter Gzowski’s
Morningside
every day while I had my breakfast. My apartment was near the downtown non-campus of Concordia University, and every day for nearly two years I would walk up one of the side streets north of Sherbrooke that had formed part of the old Golden Square Mile of the city’s longgone Scots elite to an outbuilding of Montreal General where I met with a Freudian analyst, as Trudeau himself had once done in Paris.

I didn’t know about Trudeau’s analysis then, though I knew that at his retirement he had purchased a house on Pine Avenue not two hundred paces from the little path that led up the slope of Mount Royal to my analyst’s outbuilding.
He had paid $200,000 for it, the papers had said, which seemed a respectable sum at the time for someone of his eminence and means. When I finally dared to sneak a glance at the house, however, I was surprised at how unimpressive it looked, a tiny, boxlike place that clung to its narrow lot on that busy stretch of Pine without the least flourish or marker to set it apart. Later I would learn it had been built by Ernest Cormier, the designer of the Supreme Court building in Ottawa, and that it was considered an art deco masterpiece. At the time, however, I thought Trudeau had gone a bit far with his legendary frugality and might at least have sprung for a proper front lawn.

Every day as I trudged up the foothills of Mount Royal to my session, and particularly as I trudged down again and my back was to him, I thought of Trudeau perched in his little fortress on Pine Avenue. I had no particular desire to run into him, fearing, perhaps, that something would be lost then: he would prove truly as short as people said, or would snub me, or pick his nose. Yet it was Trudeau, perhaps single-handedly, who had brought me to Montreal. I had dutifully taken French all through high school and had even learned some; I had gone to Winter Carnival; I had done a month of intensive French at the Alliance Française in Paris. I had chosen Montreal for my graduate studies not because
of the schools, of which I knew almost nothing, but for one reason only: the French. Who but Trudeau could I blame for this? He may not have invented bilingualism, but he had made it sexy; he might never have uttered the phrase “two solitudes,” yet it was surely because of him that I felt obliged to break them down.

By the time I left Montreal in 1988, it would have been fair to say that my experiment in national reconciliation had been a resounding failure. By then I had come to realize that I was indeed what had seemed to have been stamped in my passport when I’d first arrived, an anglophone, and that the hard work of building cultural bridges, in Montreal as elsewhere, was exactly that, hard work. Who had the time, really? Between classes and coursework and psychoanalysis and worrying about datelessness and the state of the world, there weren’t many hours left in the day for nation building. At Concordia, at least in the English department, the two solitudes still reigned—in two years of classes I met a single francophone Quebecer, around whom an aura of suspicion hung because he had thrown in his lot with the anglos when everyone knew the real action was in the other camp. Meanwhile a joint lecture series on literary theory that Concordia had organized with the Université du Québec à Montréal had deteriorated into a bit of a farce: in the search
for a “neutral” location, the organizers had chosen a venue out near the old Expo site that required three bus transfers from downtown and a call ahead to the security guard to warn him you’d be coming. The lectures alternated between English and French; the francophones went to the French ones, and the anglophones to the English.

My own French, I quickly discovered, was not quite at the level that made conversing with me in it really worth the bother. It was just as well, as most of the francophones I ran into in the course of a day also spoke English, a language I was quite fluent in. In the four years I spent in Montreal, less French crossed my lips than in the single month I had spent at the Alliance Française in Paris. I had no one to blame for this except myself, though perhaps in a slightly less laden atmosphere—Togo, say, or Martinique—I have might been more willing to risk humiliation. It could have been that I simply never built up a sufficient escape velocity to cross over, to leave the familiar. But the more time that passed, the easier it became to stay in my little world, so that what had seemed incredible to me when I arrived, that there were people who had lived in Montreal all of their lives who didn’t speak a word of French, made perfect sense to me when I left. Some years later I spent several days entirely immersed in francophone Montreal promoting the French
translation of one of my novels, and I felt as if I had entered a completely different city than the one I had lived in for four years.

TO WHAT EXTENT
,
then, had Trudeau’s vision succeeded? To judge from my own experience, not much. When I arrived in Montreal in 1984, it was true, the word on the street was that nationalism, for lack of interest, had died a quiet death: after the failed referendum and then the failed constitution, people had turned their attention to other matters. The young were more interested in finding jobs than in planning revolutions, and they were enrolling en masse in ESL courses to make up for their forced education in French under Bill 101. Meanwhile there was talk of a “victory of the cradle” much different from the one Quebec’s Catholic Church had promoted earlier in the century. From having had one of the highest birth rates in the world then, Quebecers now had one of the lowest, so that soon the immigrant population would so have shifted the Quebec demographic that any hope of a successful referendum would have vanished.

By the time of my departure, however, the atmosphere in the city had completely changed. Out of nowhere, it seemed, crowds numbering in the tens of thousands were suddenly marching in the streets, as nationalist sentiment
reared its hydra head again. If there was a single culprit to blame for the resurgence it was the mandarin on the hill, well into retirement now: Citizen Trudeau. Under the provisions of his Charter, the Quebec Court of Appeal had ruled unconstitutional the section of Bill 101 prohibiting English signs. All over the city, placards went up on people’s balconies.
“Ne touchez pas à la loi 101!”
Hands off Bill 101. Suddenly all the old sentiment was there, all the sense of outrage. Robert Bourassa was back in office by then, after the demotion of Claude Ryan and the implosion of the PQ, and when the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the ruling of the Court of Appeal, Bourassa pulled out his nationalist colours to assure the public that the law would stand. Stand it did, as Bill 178, this time bearing the proud imprimatur of the Charter’s “notwithstanding” clause. This was not the first time the clause had been invoked: René Lévesque, after the constitution had been passed into law, had bitterly attached it to every piece of legislation that had crossed his desk before he left office in 1985. But Bill 178 was the first use of the clause in specific response to a court ruling.

What had briefly felt like an end, then, turned out to be the merest lull. Over the next years it would seem that all of Trudeau’s work had been for naught, that it had merely sown the seeds for another vicious cycle of polarization between
English and French. From the Charter came the challenge to 101; from the challenge came all the old nationalist bitterness; from the bitterness came the disastrous 1987 Meech Lake Accord of Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. While the accord was a perfectly legitimate attempt to do what Trudeau in 1981 had promised to do “in the coming weeks” but had never got around to, namely to find a way to bring Quebec into the constitution, it ended up fanning the flames of nationalist sentiment rather than putting them out, reopening the constitutional “can of worms” that Trudeau had claimed to have closed definitively. The accord’s three-year timeline for ratification, required because it changed the constitution’s amending formula, made it a sitting duck, providing ample opportunity for opposition to fester and grow against controversial clauses such as the one recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society.”