It’s time for Trudeau to muzzle himself
His dumb crusade against the distinct society clause marks him as a defender of a position that lost its relevance long ago
BUSINESS WATCH
PETER C. NEWMAN
The parliamentary committee that will decide the fate of the government’s new constitutional package got off to a slow start in Charlottetown last week—but it was Pierre Trudeau who provided the fireworks.
Acting through his trio of surrogates, Jean Chrétien, Clyde Wells and Sharon Carstairs, the former prime minister was mainly responsible for sabotaging the original version of Meech Lake 16 months ago, and now he’s at it again.
Trudeau’s prime motive for his dramatic intervention in the present national unity debate is obviously to make certain that his successor doesn’t succeed where he failed, by bringing Quebec into Canada’s constitutional family. But the country’s future, and not just prime ministerial reputations, are at stake here. For once, Trudeau should shut up and stop pretending he’s the country’s conscience or marriage counsellor. His dumb crusade against the distinct society clause marks him as a defender of a position that lost its relevance generations ago. It’s high time Trudeau muzzled himself, so we can at least have a decent shot at negotiating a compact that will keep this country together.
What Trudeau said in a supposedly off-therecord session attended by more than 300 members of the Young Presidents’ Organization and spouses in Montreal was that since the distinct society clause in the new Mulroney package includes recognition of a Frenchspeaking majority in Quebec, that would give the provincial government the power to order “deportation of a couple of hundred thousand non-French-speaking Quebecers” on the basis that it would “have the right to expel people, certainly to shut their traps up if they think they can speak English in public.”
Norman Webster, the Montreal Gazettes editor, who reported the incident, noted that Trudeau was not musing about logical possibilities, as a professor might when trying to make his class think more deeply, but that “he said
what he said flatly, harshly, without qualification.”
PQ Leader Jacques Parizeau, who must secretly have been pleased with such a boost to his cause, still took on the former prime minister, pointing out that his remark had been “a malicious attempt to get European immigrants, especially Jews, to subconsciously equate Quebec nationalism with nazism . . . because in their personal experiences, lots of anglophones in Quebec have a personal knowledge of deportation by totalitarian regimes.” Constitutional Affairs Minister Joe Clark waded in with the sensible comment that the proposal Trudeau had floated was not possible in law and impossible in practice. “No court would allow it,” Clark said, “and no government would propose it.”
Trudeau's outburst was entirely in character, reflecting his conviction that individual rights must always be protected from the tyranny of the majority, which is what his Charter of Rights and Freedoms was all about. That approach clashes head-on with the inclusion of collective rights, as proposed by the Mulroney government’s new constitutional reforms, which spell out provisions for entrenching the distinctiveness of Quebec and the ab-
original nations. That approach subtracts nothing from individual rights and, being a constitutional lawyer, Trudeau must know that the distinct society clause in the current federal proposals explicitly takes into account Quebec’s anglophone minority.
There is no way those proposals could be used to threaten the existence of English-speaking Canadians in Quebec. In fact, the first section of the charter subjects its rights and freedoms to such “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” Deportation hardly qualifies.
Even Meech Lake’s severest critics disagree with the Trudeau interpretation. Toronto lawyer Neil Finkelstein (who, along with Deborah Coyne, one of Trudeau’s lovers, was Clyde Wells’s other constitutional adviser) points out that any wholesale deportation of Anglos from Quebec would clearly alter the nature of Quebec’s distinctiveness, and thus be inadmissible.
Lysiane Gagnon, the respected columnist at La Presse, acknowledged that it was always difficult to comment on such apocalyptic visions because of the large elements of delirium they contain, and demanded why the former PM had stopped at brandishing the threat of deportation. “Mr. Trudeau does not show much imagination,” she complained. “It would also be possible to open concentration camps on James Bay, force women to have a child every year, forbid mixed marriages, have anyone who persists in reading Shakespeare broken on the wheel, make anyone whose ancestors did not come from La Rochelle or Poitou wear the blue star. . . . Come on, Mr. Trudeau, keep it up, you’re off to such a good start!”
Her fellow columnist Alain Dubuc expressed the fear that Trudeau’s “silly, mean joke” was a way of stirring up tensions between French and English “that is not only irresponsible; it borders on insanity.” He accuses the former prime minister of being “driven by an obsessional desire to be right. Mr. Trudeau cannot let anyone else succeed where he failed. While his successor is trying, at times awkwardly, to straighten things out, Mr. Trudeau is doing wilful damage.”
“Polarization,” said William Davis, the former Ontario premier, speaking in another context, “will damage us all. It’s not a case of one region being better than any other, but simply being different. Acknowledging Quebec as a distinct society is nothing more than that: accepting the reality that it’s a different society and that such recognition subtracts nothing from the rest of the country.”
Even if most Canadians find the very idea of constitutional reform a giant yawn, what’s involved is nothing less than the most fundamental transaction between citizen and state: the setting out of powers and priorities of one over the other; the definition of the limits of collective and individual freedom.
That’s the crucial exercise we’re involved in during the next 12 months. It would be nice to get through it without any more geriatric outbursts from Pierre Trudeau, our onetime idol who refuses to grow old gracefully, or even sensibly.
