The myths of Meech Lake live on
25 years later: For all the things that survived the accord, the most onerous provisions are gladly in the dustbin of history
There are millions of Canadians who have no memory of the day the Meech Lake accord crashed and burned 25 years ago this week.
Much has changed in the interim. Governments have risen and fallen. Whole parties have come into being, flared and faded. Yet the one thing that has not changed is the invincible certainty of its proponents that they were right, and that the public, which rejected it massively, was wrong. Canada: a country too good for its people.
For a group so convinced of their own rightness, the Meech set seem unusually susceptible to falsehoods. The whole rationale for the accord was and is steeped in myth, and myth upon myth: that Quebec was left out of the negotiations on the 1982 Constitution, that its powers were reduced, that its consent was not given, that consequently without its signature it has somehow been excluded from the Constitution all these years.
These have been repeated so often that people who weren’t around at the time may believe them to be true, or at least true enough. But they aren’t. Quebec was not left out of the negotiations: its separatist premier, Rene Levesque, broke with his erstwhile colleagues in the socalled Gang of Eight, who, seeing their common front breached and fearing the referendum on patriation to which he had foolishly agreed, chose the moment to close the deal with the feds.
Quebec’s powers were not reduced in the document that resulted. All the provinces gained powers — over natural resources, over federal equalization payments, over the Constitution itself, via the amending formula — but Quebec’s position was especially enhanced. It alone was guaranteed three of nine Supreme Court judges. It alone was given a pass on minority-language schooling obligations to which the rest agreed, even as protection for the French language was being entrenched.
Quebec did give its consent, at least in part, via the 72 of 75 MPs from the province who voted in favour of the new Constitution — with the support, as polls showed at the time, of the overwhelming majority of the population. The province’s separatist government, it is true, did not agree. But if we dismiss Quebec’s representatives in the federal government as irrelevant, we are essentially conceding the whole separatist argument. And in any event, it does not mean Quebec is not part of the Constitution — as successive Quebec governments themselves have tacitly accepted, having invoked the same Constitution repeatedly when it suited them.
From such misbegotten premises, it was unsurprising that Meech, the package of amendments intended to bring Quebec in to the Constitution, should have proved so disastrous in result. It is not worth rehearsing the arguments pro and con that consumed us all at the time, in the three-year interval between the accord’s negotiation and its grisly end. It suffices for present purposes to point out that the accord did not, in fact, pass.
For such is the profound conviction of its proponents — that the accord was not just right, but historically inevitable — that it has become shrouded in still greater myth, to the effect that, notwithstanding its defeat, all of its principal provisions were somehow enacted all the same. The prime minister who negotiated it, Brian Mulroney, is particularly fond of this one. “We got all of the anguish,” he has been wont to say, “and none of the benefits.”
Now, it is true that some of Meech’s provisions have become the de facto practice, or indeed have passed into law. For example, the notion that provinces should be able to opt out of national shared-cost social programs and, provided they put something similar in place, still receive their share of the funds, is now widely accepted — or would be, if the feds were still in the business of launching new social programs. But that is a long way from constitutionally entrenching the same idea, with all of the legal and political ramifications that would entail.
Let us consider, in the same light, some of the accord’s other provisions. It would have required senators to be selected from provincial lists, and not only senators but Supreme Court justices, too: never happened. It would have given every province a veto over nearly all constitutional amendments, making what is now the exception — unanimity — the general rule. That, too, never happened: the legislated loan of the federal veto to each of five regions is not nearly as restrictive, or as permanent.
Not that we would not have been talking about the Constitution. In one of its oddest provisions, Meech Lake would have entrenched in the Constitution annual first ministers conferences on the Constitution. (Also first ministers conferences on the economy. By law. Forever.) And of course, it included the infamous distinct society clause — not in the preamble, as the Quebec Liberal party had originally demanded, as a symbolic nod to the province’s sensitivities, but as an interpretive clause, the first in the Constitution in fact, through which lens every line of what followed was to be read.
I am aware the Supreme Court takes into account the province’s distinctiveness in making judgments today. I am also aware seemingly innocuous lines in the Constitution can take on a life of their own, which is precisely why its advocates were so insistent it should be included. At any rate, one of two things would have happened. Either the clause would have proved the instrument for eviscerating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and expanding Quebec’s powers that its opponents feared and its more forthright proponents boasted. Or it would not, and Quebecers would have been told they had been betrayed. Again.
Fortunately, because Meech failed, we will never have to find out which.