CKNW Editorial
for October 5, 2000

The tumult and the shouting dies, the captains and the kings depart … so said Kipling … so be it with Pierre Elliot Trudeau. But, in fact, he’s not going to go away because Jean Chretien and the Liberals want to run for office on his memory. To hear him talk, you would think that Jean Chretien was a disciple of Trudeau’s and is carrying on his great record. Such a notion is nothing short of fraudulent.

Trudeau is, we are reminded, responsible for bringing the constitution to Canada – in this glory Jean Chretien now wishes to bask. But let’s examine what Mr Trudeau really did and see how much credit Mr Chreiten is entitled to take.

Patriating the constitution, in itself, was child’s play. The stickler was, how do you amend it? For there’s no point having a constitution if you haven’t got within the document the means by which it can be changed. The provinces, especially Quebec, had always held that an amendment required the unanimous consent of the provinces. Trudeau threatened to patriate it strictly as an act of the federal government and sort out the amending bit later but the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously held that such a move would do injury to constitutional custom so Trudeau backed off. The Amending formula, which permitted patriation to happen, had nothing whatever to do with Mr Trudeau or Mr Chretien who sat on the Cabinet Committee on the constitution – as did I amongst others. If any one person is entitled to be called the author of the Vancouver formula it was the late Mel Smith. Having got provincial agreement (including that of Rene Levesque, the separatist premier of Quebec, I might add) Trudeau was able to bring the constitution to Canada. Amongst other things, Quebec lost her veto over constitutional change – a very big deal indeed.

I’ll come back to the amending formula in a moment. But let’s look at Meech Lake and Charlottetown. Since Meech was defeated the same day Chretien became Liberal leader his opinions are not relevant. But on these two initiatives, Trudeau was unmovable. He stood foursquare against both of them and, in the strongest possible language condemned and mocked the notion of a "distinct society" for Canada. For Mr Chretien and the Liberals to now claim they are the heirs of Pierre Trudeau they must then be saying that they were against Meech and Charlottetown, against "distinct society" designation for Quebec and in favour of the 7&50 amending formula.

The trouble is, the record not only doesn’t bear this out, the very opposite is the case. Mr Chretien sat on the fence on Charlottetown, afraid to contradict his master and just as afraid of offending the voters. His party, however, enthusiastically supported the deal. Now let’s fast forward to December 1995 and look at the Commons resolution brought forward by Jean Chretien. It did two things – it recognized, in federal matters, Quebec as a distinct Society. Three years after his master, Pierre Trudeau wrote a scathing denunciation of this notion in Macleans magazine, thus giving a huge boos to the "no" forces, his self confessed disciple embraced it.

The second thing Chretien did in this resolution was to scupper the amending formula agreed to by Trudeau when patriating the constitution, by resolving to veto any change to the constitution if asked to by any one of Canada’s regions, thus, in effect, restoring Quebec’s veto.

Does this action of the Jean Chretien government look or sound like the true heirs to Pierre Trudeau, the man who stood for equality before the law of all provinces and who adopted the amending formula then entrenched it in the constitution?

The fact is that the Liberal Party, now so anxious to get the maximum political mileage possible out the death of Pierre Trudeau, has subverted his principles and hope against hope that we all have a bad memory.

It’s a disgraceful piece of political fraud for which, in less enlightened times, a sound thrashing would be in order.

Perhaps the voter will have a better memory than usual and will administer that thrashing at the polls.