Can you remember what you were doing on October 30, 1995?
This writer was home in bed with a bad cold.
October 30, 1995 was the day Quebec last held a referendum on independence, and I had spent the previous few weeks in that province helping cover the campaign for CBC radio news.
Both the publicly available polls and the internal ones we saw (but did not broadcast) told a discouraging story – for those who favoured the federalist (or “No”) side. They showed an uncomfortably tight race, with the “Yes” edging the “No” in many polls.
Those numbers made me sick (quite literally). I believed Quebeckers, and Canadians with them, were about to leap like lemmings into the swirling sea.
The Parti Québécois led by Jacques Parizeau had put the referendum in motion a year earlier, after it had defeated the Liberals in the 1994 election.
Public support for independence in Quebec had grown in the wake of the failed Charlottetown Constitutional Accord of 1992.
At Charlottetown, the federal prime minister, Brian Mulroney, the provincial premiers, the territorial leaders, and some Indigenous leaders had agreed to a comprehensive omnibus amendment to the Canadian constitution.
That amendment would have recognized Quebec as a distinct society, reformed the federal Senate, and paved the way for significant progress toward Indigenous self-government.
It all sounded good to many Canadians.
But there was a hitch.
The leaders who gathered at Charlottetown also agreed to put the whole package to the Canadian people in a referendum, which they scheduled for the fall of 1992.
At first, victory for the supporters of the Accord looked promising.
Not only did the federal and all provincial governments support it, so did the main federal parties: the governing Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, and the New Democrats.
Then, as the campaign progressed, things went off the rails.
Nationalists in Quebec, led by the Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard, thought the Accord’s guarantees for Quebec were insufficient.
At the same time, many Canadians outside Quebec, especially in the West, believed Mulroney had given away the store to Quebec. Their champion was the leader of the still nascent right-wing Reform Party, Preston Manning.
In addition to the impact of their rational arguments, Bouchard and Manning both tapped into an inchoate mood of rebelliousness and anti-elitism throughout the country.
If that weren’t enough to doom Charlottetown, many progressives and feminists also opposed the Accord, because it gave the provinces effective veto power over new federally-initiated social programs.
They feared that the Accord would bring an end to the historic federal role in assuring all Canadians benefited to the same degree from such social programs as universal and comprehensive public health care.
And so, it was not a surprise that when the vote happened, the majority of Canadians said “No” to Charlottetown.
But the near cataclysm of October 30, 1995 has deeper roots than that.
Indeed, the melodrama which reached its climax at the 1995 Quebec referendum was like one of those long “beget or begot” passages in the Bible. (Those are where the Bible’s anonymous authors tell their readers how one generation spawned the next, and then the next, and so on, through many generations.)
From 1980’s referendum to 1981’s constitutional changes to Meech and Charlottetown
It was an earlier failed effort to amend the constitution that begot the futile Charlottetown effort.
In 1987, Mulroney and the provincial premiers met at a onetime lakeside hunting lodge near Ottawa and cooked up an accord they named after the lake: the Meech Lake Accord.
This agreement had nothing to say about Indigenous rights and was mostly focused on recognizing Quebec as a distinct society.
Meech, in turn, was indirectly a result of the first Quebec independence referendum, in 1980.
In 1980 the “No” side trounced the “Yes” by a 20 per cent margin. One might have expected such a result to put the independence option to bed for a very long time.
It did not work out that way.
During the 1980 campaign the federal prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, promised that after it was all over, he would work to modernize the Canadian constitution, which, at that time, was largely an 1867 document.
Trudeau did keep his promise, but in a way that offended many Quebeckers.
The federal prime minister succeeded in getting a major change to the constitution enacted in 1981. That’s why we now have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms (with a notwithstanding clause), and a made-in-Canada formula for amending the constitution.
However, in so doing Pierre Trudeau and nine of the premiers isolated Quebec in a way that caused a deep wound.
Trudeau and the nine premiers devised their agreement in the middle of the night, while the Quebec premier of the time, René Lévesque, was asleep in his hotel room. In Quebec, they came to describe that event as “the night of the long knives”.
The Meech agreement and then the Charlottetown Accord were supposed to heal the wound created by Quebec’s isolation in 1981.
But both Accords turned out to be exercises in disillusionment and disappointment. In a way, they exacerbated the condition they were supposed to heal.
A near-death experience for Canada
By 1995, the forces of Canadian disunity were again ascendant, not only in Quebec, but most virulently there.
On the eve of the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, Lucien Bouchard went on television and held up a copy of the tabloid newspaper the Journal de Québec featuring the day-after story about the 1981 “night of the long knives”.
The front-page photo showed Pierre Trudeau and his justice minister and key constitutional negotiator Jean Chrétien laughing. Bouchard said they were mocking Quebec. He invited Quebeckers to keep that in mind when voting the next day.
Francophone Quebeckers heeded Bouchard’s call. A large majority voted “Yes.”
But an even larger majority of non-francophones Quebeckers voted “No,” and that, just barely, tilted the balance toward the anti-independence side. The margin of victory was tiny, less than one per cent.
In 1995, federal Liberal Jean Chrétien was prime minister.
Earlier that year, his finance minister, Paul Martin, had produced a slash-and-burn austerity budget.
Martin made deep cuts to social-program-transfers to the provinces, entirely eliminated federal housing programs, and eviscerated development assistance and cultural spending.
Chrétien and Martin argued that they had no choice. The federal deficit had grown so big, they said, it threatened Canada’s credit rating.
They might have had a point about the out-of-control deficit, though much of it was not due to government spending but to the excessively high interest rates the Bank of Canada had set in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Chrétien and Martin never considered a balanced approach, matching judicious spending cuts with equally judicious increases in taxes on the wealthiest and most privileged among us.
Instead, they chose a harsh approach whose main victims were the sick, the poor, and the homeless. Quebeckers took note and were not impressed.
Chrétien had a majority in the federal House of Commons, and, in any case, the largest opposition group from outside Quebec were the Reformers, who wanted even deeper cuts. He had no worries on that front.
But federal austerity was a big contributing factor to the “No” side’s feeble, near-loss result.
During the referendum campaign a group of Roman Catholic nuns and priests said they supported the “Yes” option because the federal government lacked a commitment to “social solidarity.” They articulated what many francophone Quebeckers felt.
Mark Carney should heed the lessons of 1995
Today, 30 years later, we could be heading for a re-run of the 1995 near-death experience.
The next Quebec election will happen within the next 12 months. The separatist Parti Québécois is comfortably ahead in all opinion polls.
Next week Mark Carney and his finance minister François-Philippe Champagne will present a decidedly austerity-focused budget to Parliament.
In 1995 the New Democratic contingent in Parliament had been reduced to a single-digit rump as it is today.
There was little air time in the House for alternative, humane and progressive alternatives to big-business-sanctioned fiscal conservatism. And the mainstream media unanimously applauded the federal Liberals’ conversion to right-wing economics.
Canada survived the excruciatingly close vote in 1995. And back then the leader of the U.S. was a friendly admirer of Canada, Bill Clinton, not a malevolent Fascist who threatens to annex Canada.
The jeopardy of a split in Canada is far greater now than it was in 1995. Like a hungry predator ready to pounce, Donald Trump would rub his hands in glee at the prospect of Canada falling apart at the seams.
Right now, Canadians outside Quebec tend to be more concerned about the quite real threat to national unity posed by Alberta, rather than the spectre of a Quebec separatist movement that refuses to go away.
We should not, however, forget the lessons of 1995.
One of those lessons is that while federal austerity might play well to the Ottawa and Bay Street elites, it could backfire badly elsewhere in the country.
The current federal government might want to spend some time studying recent Canadian history before it locks itself into an exercise in severe austerity.
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