Balancing individual and collective rights
I didn’t always agree with Claude Ryan, but he was a great man, Neil Cameron says.
I read Royal Orr’s Saturday column (“Ryan brought linguistic peace to Quebec”) with nostalgia, broad agreement, but a few reservations. The nostalgia came in recalling our CJAD debate shortly before the 1989 Quebec election. I was one of the four Equality Party candidates who won seats in it. Orr argued, roughly, that Quebec anglos could catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I was more abrasive, arguing that Robert Bourassa’s recent surrender to nationalist fevers had made 1989 a time for counting flies and switching to vinegar.
Equality Party Leader Robert Libman and I found ourselves under constant pressure for the next five years: More honey! More vinegar! We navigated as best we could, and in constant contact with Claude Ryan. For the first period we were there, he held the language and education portfolios, later both municipalities and public security, so both Libman and I met him regularly in committees as well as in the main chamber.
I also dined with Ryan several times in the evening in the almost empty legislature dining hall. I worked late by preference; he did so by necessity, as a uniquely capable workaholic on whom Bourassa could pile heavy responsibilities with confidence. I found him invariably intelligent, well-briefed, morally conscientious and administratively capable. He was also lively and even funny in private conversation, unlike his rather austere public image. I several times disagreed with him strongly, but always found his positions carefully reasoned.
My disagreements were as much with his unrealistic journalism as his practical politics. This is where I also disagree with Orr and philosopher George Grant. For example, I certainly never blamed Ryan for being horrified by Pierre Trudeau’s making snide use of the inversion of Acton’s famous aphorism about power, its absolute absence “corrupting.” But I thought Ryan gave Trudeau good reason to be irritated, coming up with a highly impractical proposal of negotiating the 1970 FLQ hostage crisis by assembling some sort of huge assembly of just about everybody in Quebec public life. Later, in 1980, Ryan came up with a big thick Beige Paper for a new constitutional compact that fell still-born from the press. In the tense 1987-90 years, in a speech at Queen’s University, he gave an almost Camille-Laurin-like defence of a concept of “linguistic territoriality.”
Orr is right that Ryan was always trying to strike a balance between individual and collective rights, but he also did so like a man constantly adjusting sails and rudder to changing winds of public opinion and passions. He was not entirely unhappy to respond to our Equality Party victories, finding them a useful nudge to set against the nationalist heat he was getting, not only from the Parti Québécois, but from elements of the Liberals, as well.
Five years after we showed up, with Libman taking an active part in Ryan’s committee working out Bill 86, and after the general exhaustion in all quarters that followed the storms of 1992 and 1993, he commented to me with a smile, “Now it is possible to move to some sensible moderation.”
Years earlier, when the Oka Crisis was on, he remarked to me that its peaceful outcome, after initial frightening confrontation, one early death and the Canadian Army brought in, had shown the real strengths of federalism: “The federal government checked the Quebec government, the Quebec government checked Ottawa, and the natives checked everyone.” I responded, “I see you are a true disciple of Lord Acton.” He laughed with pleasure, and cried, “Notre maitre!”
Ryan made plenty of enemies in both language communities, including in my party and his own, but he was less alarmed than most politicians would be, serene in his faith and love for all Quebec. He was not exactly a great liberal, but he was a great man.
Neil Cameron served as MNA Jacques Cartier 1989-1994.