National Post (National Edition)
Dion was poor leader, but a great federalist
Stemmed tide of Quebec separatism
Acabinet shuffle is an occasion to take stock of the prime minister and his government, judge its successes and failures and evaluate its priorities. On occasion, it can also serve as a chance to write a public servant’s political obituary.
And so it is with Stéphane Dion, the foreign affairs minister who is leaving politics. He has reportedly been offered a job as Canada’s ambassador to Germany and to the European Union, but has not yet decided whether he will accept. With Dion gone from government, Canada loses one of its most vital cabinet ministers of the past quarter century.
Maybe all you know of Dion is his spell as Justin Trudeau’s point man on foreign affairs — in which case, you’d be tempted to greet his departure from cabinet with a cheer or a bit of a sneer. From his there-is-a-gun-tomy-temple defence of the Saudi arms deal to the fuzzylogic of his “responsible conviction” doctrine, which attempts to pass off rank self-interest as a higher form of principle, Dion’s work on this file has been a shambles. In recent months, his Twitter feed has tried to front Dion as some sort of globe-trotting foreign policy Kardashian. It was clearly a cry for help.
Or maybe all you remember of Dion before this was his Chance the Gardener spell as Liberal Party leader, sandwiched for two years between that guy who lost to Stephen Harper and promptly left politics and that other guy who lost to Stephen Harper and promptly left politics and Canada. Dion as the huggable tree-hugger, selling his “Green Shift” tax policy with broken English and a dog named Kyoto, was never going to fly west of Yonge Street or east of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. But along the way he got disgracefully sandbagged by Mike Duffy on national television, then blew himself up with a screwball attempt to lead a coalition to overthrow the Harper government and install himself as prime minister, after he had already resigned as leader.
Which is to say that if your appreciation of Stéphane Dion’s career in politics goes back a decade, you might have him pegged as the Liberal party’s Joe Clark — an intelligent, well-meaning man who won leadership by accident and who found a second wind in politics as a quiet, hard-working but unexceptional MP.
If so, you would have the complete mismeasure of the man. Because there is another Stéphane Dion, who is something of a hero to anyone who worked in the trenches of the federalist cause in the 1990s.
It’s important to remember that from the moment Pierre Trudeau retired, there ceased to be anyone in power in Ottawa who would defend federalism on intellectual grounds. From Brian Mulroney’s cravenness towards the provinces to Jean Chrétien’s refusal even to think about the problem, two political generations were suckled on the conviction that the separatists had the arguments while the federalists had to rely on sentiment.
It took Stéphane Dion to show everyone that the exact opposite was the case. Pulled out of academia by Chrétien after the near-disaster of the 1995 referendum, Dion brought with him a reputation as an intellectual pit bull, the sort of academic who starts berating a visiting speaker during the Q&A and keeps at it through dinner and drinks and the drive back to the hotel.
Before Dion even had a seat in the Commons, Chrétien made him minister of intergovernmental affairs, which was a polite-company term for minister of putting separatists in their place. He asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the legality of a unilateral declaration of independence by a Quebec government. Once he had his answer, he proceeded to take apart the separatist arguments premise by premise in a barrage of speeches, essays, and letters. The most famous of these were the open letters he directed at Lucien Bouchard, Bernard Landry and Jacques Brassard, successfully prosecuting them for intellectual dishonesty. And to cap it all, he was the architect of the Clarity Act, the moment Ottawa finally decided to stand up for itself and for Canada.
If Stéphane Dion had done nothing else, if he had left politics in 2003 when he stopped serving as intergovernmental affairs minister and gone back to university life, he’d have earned his place on our money. His record since then has been mixed at best, though history will probably record the Green Shift as having simply been ahead of its time.
But he was the most important Quebec federalist of his day, and he helped save his country. Few men can say that.