Pierre Trudeau's Essay on the Quebec Referendum, by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada.

This tactic would eventually constitute an almost insurmountable obstacle to the patriation of the constitution once the Supreme Court of Canada in September 1981, declared that that, as conventions dictated, the Canadian government could not patriate without a "substantial level of provincial consent." The Gang of Eight's solidarity was broken on Nov. 4, 1981, when during a negotiation meeting and without warning his colleagues, Rene Levesque accepted a proposal from Canada's prime minister to resolve the constitutional stumbling block through a referendum. By going back on his word to his seven allies, Mr Levesque forced them to regroup in a common front without him.

II - DEMANDS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES

Mr. Bouchard's assertion:

"For 30 years, the fundamental reason why.... we were never able to convince English Canada (to concede) even Quebec's smallest historical demands is not that we sent people who were not good negotiators. we had the best ones. we had Rene Levesque." (Oct. 18, 1995 - St. Leonard)

THE FACTS:

Let us first examine the question of demands and then that of the negotiators.

1. The true "historical" demands of French Canadians consisted essentially of one thing: respect for the French fact in Canada, mainly in the areas of language at the federal level and of education in the provinces where francophones were a minority. Thus the first two demands of premier Lesage, presented in July 1960 at the start of the Quiet Revolution, were : first, to reopen negotiations for patriating the constitution and its amending formula, and second, to adopt, within the constitution, a charter of fundamental rights, including the linguistic and educational rights of French speaking minorities outside Quebec.

   Despite Mr. Bouchard's assertion, the Fulton-Favreau formula satisfied the first requirement; the Victoria charter satisfied the first one fully and the second one partially; and the Constitution Act of 1982 entirely satisfied both requirements. In the three cases, these traditional demands were abandoned by successive Quebec governments when they went back on their word.
   

2. Let us examine the question of negotiators where , as Mr. Bouchard said, "we had the best ones." More particularly, how can one explain that Mr. Levesque, the master negotiator - who only had to hold his own for a few more hours to turn to his advantage the enormous enterprise of constitutional revision which had started in 1967 and was to end on Nov. 4, 1981 - could suddenly betray the Gang of Eight's accord to accept my offer of a public consultation via a referendum? Though this question will doubtless never be answered, I offer the following hypothesis. Did he fear I would accept their proposal ? Mr. Levesque would then have been caught at this own game since, by signing this accord, he had supported a patriation formula, which included neither a distinct- society clause, nor a veto for his province.
   

But then how can we explain that he then reneged on my referendum proposal which he had accepted a few hours before? Was he negotiating in good faith, or rather, was he trying to sabotage any federal-provincial co-operation designed to solve the constitutional problem?

III- THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES: SHEER FABRICATION

Mr. Bouchard's assertion:

"Although there was an alliance with Rene Levesque to reach a reasonable agreement, these seven English Speaking provinces... abandoned him in the course of one night." (Oct., 23, 1995 - CEGEP de Limouilou)

It should first b noted that when Mr. Bouchard speaks of a "reasonable agreement" he does not know what he is talking about. This agreement explicitly rejected both the notion of distinct society and that of a veto, two items which Mr. Bouchard is constantly seeking for Quebec.

THE FACTS:

The 'Night' in question is of course that of the so-called "Long Knives," a label shamelessly borrowed from Nazi history by separatists suffering from acute paranoia. ( See note)

What really happened? When Rene Levesque betrayed his allies of the Gang of Eight by accepting my referendum proposal, he lost his credibility with them. The seven English speaking premiers were in disarray and the session was adjourned to the following day, Nov. 5. But it should be underlined that the seven English provinces did not, as Mr. Bouchard says abandon Mr.Levesque. Rather, it is Mr. Levesque who abandoned them. He plunged the knife into the heart of the very accord he had signed less than seven months earlier. And when Mr. Bouchard, in his Oct. 25 speech to the nation , says that (Mr. Levesque's) "so called allies...went to meet Jean Chretien in an Ottawa hotel room in the middle of the night, " this is historical falsehood.

Here is how the newspapers reported these events at that time:

As soon as the meeting was adjourned, around noon on Nov. 4, Mr. Levesque is quoted as saying "For us, it (the Trudeau proposal) seems to be a respectable and extraordinarily interesting way of extracting ourselves from this imbroglio" To which Claude Charron, one of his ministers, added: "For us, it is the ideal solution." Le Devoir reported that "at that point, the Quebec delegation was jubilant and , at the risk of offending its partners of the Common Front, did not hesitate to climb on board with Ottawa." (Le Devour, Nov. 5,1981)

The "Risk of offending its partners" was not an imaginary one, the Quebec delegation finally realized in the afternoon of Nov. 4. This led Rene Levesque to repudiate my referendum proposal without any explanation other than saying "It is all Greek to me." Michel Vastel, a journalist then with Le Devoir, wrote: "By the end of the day , the bridges were burning between Levesque and his former allies." He added that later, while everyone thought agreements were under discussion, "a senior Quebec official, who had been asked why he did not make a last-ditch effort to keep the provinces together, glumly answered: 'After what has happened this morning, we have lost all credibility'" (Le Devoir, Nov. 6, 1981)

For more details on the press commentaries, see Le Desaccord du Lac Meech in max Nemni's book Le Quebec et la Restructuration du Canada (pp. 177-179) and William Johnson's A Canadian Myth (pp. 180-183).

Continue to Part Two