This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.
The short, unhappy life of the Meech Lake Accord ended on June 23, 1990, sparking an intractable question that gnaws at us still: Who killed Meech?
All we know for sure is that, if the accord’s death could not be definitively pinned on the actions of a single person or party, The Globe and Mail emerged as an unintentional accessory in its demise. Though its editorials had been strongly supportive of the federal-provincial pact aimed at bringing Quebec into the 1982 Constitution, a front-page scoop on prime minister Brian Mulroney’s controversial strategy to corral three recalcitrant premiers into signing on to Meech before a critical deadline created a national uproar. Meech never had a chance after that. What followed was a lost decade of existential angst that nearly spelled the end of Canada itself.
Quebec premier Robert Bourassa and prime minister Brian Mulroney shake hands at Meech Lake in 1990.The Canadian Press
The 1987 accord – so named for the Gatineau Park retreat where Mulroney and all 10 premiers had reached a deal to address Quebec’s constitutional demands – was initially hailed as a historic triumph, a rare show of unity in the federation that would end years of constitutional bickering and deliver a death knell to the separatist cause. But the months leading up to the June, 1990, deadline for provincial legislatures to ratify the accord were filled with acrid debate. Opponents said the accord would mean the end of Canada as they had known it; supporters warned its demise would mean the end of Canada, period.
By the spring of 1990, Newfoundland, Manitoba and New Brunswick had still not ratified Meech. Mulroney made a last-ditch effort to avert a constitutional crisis by gathering the premiers in Ottawa in early June. After marathon talks, they reached a deal to pass Meech in exchange for a promise of future Senate reform. An ebullient Mulroney called Globe editor-in-chief William Thorsell to tout his achievement; Thorsell persuaded him to grant the paper an exclusive interview about “these historic meetings,” as he called them in a 2022 memoir.
For The Globe, the timing could not have been better. Under Thorsell, the paper had embarked on an ambitious redesign and had set June 12, 1990, as the relaunch date. With Mulroney’s interview in the bag, Thorsell was “delighted that we were fortuitously headed for a scoop about a critical national issue under our new nameplate on an auspicious day.”
Editor-in-chief William Thorsell and publisher Roy Megarry hold a fresh copy of the Globe’s edition of June 12, 1990, with the infamous ‘roll the dice’ story beneath a photo of Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Thorsell had no prior inkling of the firestorm that the front-page story that appeared below the fold that Tuesday morning would unleash. In it, Mulroney confided to Ottawa correspondents Susan Delacourt and Graham Fraser that he had chosen to “roll the dice” (the quote was later clarified to be “roll all the dice”) in summoning the premiers to 11th-hour talks to save Meech, rather than meeting with them weeks earlier. His comments suggested he had made a conscious decision to gamble with the country’s future. On seeing the story, Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells was furious: “It gives the impression we’re being manipulated.”
Before the story appeared, Wells, Manitoba premier Gary Filmon and New Brunswick’s Frank McKenna had agreed to put Meech to a vote in their respective legislatures before the deadline. After the story ran, only McKenna made good on his promise. Meech died on Saturday the 23rd. The following day hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers marched in Montreal’s St. Jean Baptiste Day parade, the theme of which – Notre vrai pays, c’est le Québec – set the political tone for years to come.
The debate over Meech exposed once again the fault line on which Canada had teetered since the pre-Confederation era. Perhaps no other topic has consumed editors at The Globe and Mail, or filled its national news pages, as much as the question of Quebec’s place within Canada.
Its hand in Meech’s death notwithstanding, The Globe has typically strongly defended accommodating Quebec’s differences within the federation. Early Globe editors drew a line when it came to matters of allegiance to Britain, as did later ones on questions touching language rights and religious freedom. But most of the time, keeping Canada together – and out of the hands of the Americans – required letting Quebec be Quebec, the editors argued.
It didn’t start out that way, however.
At its founding in 1844, the paper was hostile toward French Canada’s cultural and religious protectionism. Founder George Brown’s devotion to the twin political causes of representation by population – which would have left French-speaking Canada East with fewer seats in the legislative assembly than English-speaking Canada West – and his opposition to state funding for Catholic schools pitted him against Quebec’s powerful clergy and their ally, Tory leader Sir John A. Macdonald. “There can be no permanent peace in Canada till every vestige of church dominancy is swept away,” Brown wrote categorically in the autumn of 1850.
But by 1863, Brown had become a skilled and seasoned politician, and had come around to accepting Quebec’s distinctness as a necessary condition of Confederation. “It is true that the [French] show at this moment considerable dread that as the English population outnumbers them, attempts may be made to proscribe their religion, language and laws,” Brown wrote in an editorial that year. “It is possible that we need to reassure them on this point, to give them such guarantees as they may desire that their peculiar interests shall not be touched upon.” On that basis, Brown and Macdonald found common cause to launch the talks that ended in Confederation and the British North America Act of 1867.
For the next century, Globe editors remained sensitive to Quebec’s “peculiar interests,” with notable exceptions. The paper’s Loyalist bent asserted itself during two world wars, as it backed conscription in 1917 and 1942 over fierce opposition in Quebec. And The Globe saw Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, who ruled the province through a mixture of fear and coercion, as such a scourge that it became the first non-Quebec newspaper to open a Quebec City bureau in 1954. After Duplessis’s 1959 death and the election of a reformist Liberal government in 1960, The Globe’s editors rejoiced that “the voters of Quebec have rebelled against the Union Nationale corruption and elected the Liberals, who have promised a thorough house-cleaning.” It marked the beginning of a new era that would forever change the province, and Canada.
French president Charles de Gaulle visits Quebec City in 1960, seven years before his ‘Québec libre’ speech on another trip to the province.The Associated Press
In 1963, Globe reporter Anne MacDermot first wrote of the “not-so-quiet revolution” sweeping Quebec society. Soon after, the term “quiet revolution” was appropriated by Québécois analysts. La Révolution tranquille marked the rise of a new political consciousness, underlined by French president Charles de Gaulle’s infamous “Vive le Québec libre” declaration from the balcony of Montreal City Hall in 1967.
The Quiet Revolution took a dark turn in October, 1970, when Marxist indépendantistes belonging to the Front de libération du Québec kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross at his home near Westmount. Five days later, the FLQ abducted and later killed Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte. On Oct. 16, Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act.
The Globe’s editorial the following day questioned, without condemning, whether the crisis warranted the suspension of basic civil rights and limits on press freedoms the act permitted. “Only if we can believe that the Government has evidence that the FLQ is sufficiently armed to escalate the violence that it has spawned for seven years now, only if we can believe that it is virulent enough to infect other areas of society, only then can the Government’s assumption of incredible powers be tolerated.” The Trudeau government, The Globe concluded, had not produced such evidence. (The government negotiated Cross’s release on Dec. 4 by granting several FLQ members safe passage to Cuba; all returned to Canada within a decade and served only short prison sentences.)
The Globe’s edition on Nov. 16, 1976, cites René Lévesque’s incredulity at a PQ victory in Quebec.
In November, 1976, Quebec elected a new premier, the charismatic founder of the separatist Parti Québécois, René Lévesque. The following year, the PQ introduced Bill 101, legislation that made French the sole language of the province’s legislature, courts and workplace. It limited access to English-language public schools, and banned the use of English on outdoor commercial signs.
Anglophones began leaving the province in droves; so did the corporate head offices. “The Parti Québécois has made many businesses feel insecure, has put their profits under threat, with its language law and its intention to take Quebec out of Canada,” The Globe wrote in an editorial.
Still, in 1980, on the eve of the first Quebec referendum on sovereignty, The Globe’s editorial board insisted a No victory could not mean business as usual: “It should be recognized by Canadians outside Quebec that when we urge the people of Quebec to vote no, we are committing ourselves to the negotiation of change, real and possibly wrenching change, in the structure of Confederation as we know it.” The No side won, handily.
Prime minister Pierre Trudeau signs the Constitution proclamation in 1982, alongside the Queen and federal officials including Jean Chrétien, far left.John McNeill/The Globe and Mail
In 1981, the PQ vowed to fight Trudeau’s efforts to unilaterally patriate the BNA Act. But an alliance of Lévesque and seven other premiers opposed to patriation collapsed at a November first ministers’ conference in Ottawa. The federal government and nine provinces excluding Quebec agreed to patriate the BNA Act and include a new Charter of Rights. In April, 1982, Queen Elizabeth proclaimed the new Constitution in a ceremony on Parliament Hill.
The Globe editorial page provided a mixed assessment: “What was accomplished was considerable. At least we finally moved as a federal state. Some of us argued that we had laboured and produced a typical Canadian compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It was an angry settlement, arrived at in the worst way to effect abiding change. It involved methods that, if indulged in often, would leave us in danger of ceasing to be a country.”
Campaigning in 1984, Mulroney promised to bring Quebec into the 1982 Constitution “with honour and enthusiasm.” His Tories swept Quebec and the Meech Lake Accord was struck on April 30, 1987. “[The] accord is a progressive, supple, sometimes wisely ambiguous document that is well-suited in most of its provisions to Canada in modern times,” the paper argued in a March 23, 1990, editorial. It is with some irony, then, that The Globe’s front-page scoop on June 12 dealt the perhaps fatal blow to Meech.
Affronted by the accord’s demise, then-Quebec premier Robert Bourassa launched and strongly supported a commission that called for a provincewide referendum on either sovereignty or a new constitutional offer from the rest of Canada by October, 1992. In response, Mulroney and constitutional affairs minister Joe Clark gathered with the non-Quebec premiers to formulate a new offer to Quebec, which became known as the Charlottetown Accord.
Bourassa decided to hold a referendum on this modified version of Meech, which included additional guarantees of self-government for Indigenous Canadians and the promise of a Triple-E (equal, elected and effective) Senate. Mulroney opted for a referendum in the rest of Canada.
The Yes campaign got off to a terrible start after The Globe’s Quebec City correspondent Rhéal Séguin obtained the transcript of a telephone conversation between two of Bourassa’s top constitutional advisers. According to Séguin’s Sept. 16 front-page scoop, André Tremblay told Diane Wilhemy that Bourassa had “never wanted a referendum on sovereignty” and had “caved in” to pressure from other premiers to sign on to the Charlottetown Accord.
Once again, The Globe’s news and editorial pages were at odds with each other on the critical national-unity file. “The Charlottetown accord maintains a rational balance between individual rights ‘guaranteed’ in the Charter, and the recognitions of Quebec and the aboriginal peoples,” the paper editorialized on Oct. 22. “The history of Canada was made by saying Yes to compatriots of different kinds within a single state. Yes then; Yes still.” Four days later, Canadians voted No to Charlottetown.
Jacques Parizeau celebrates the PQ’s election victory on Sept. 12, 1994, alongside wife Lisette Lapointe, left.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
In 1994, the PQ returned to power with a majority government under Jacques Parizeau, with a second referendum on sovereignty set for Oct. 30, 1995. After early campaign polls showed the No side with a large lead, sovereigntist strategists persuaded a reluctant Parizeau to take a back seat to the charismatic Bloc Québécois leader Lucien Bouchard, a gifted orator who a year earlier had survived a near-fatal bout of flesh-eating disease that claimed his left leg.
“His presence electrifies Yes supporters in packed halls,” Globe columnist Jeffrey Simpson wrote of Bouchard on Oct. 12. “He, more than the other secessionist leaders, can reach ordinary francophone Quebeckers, summoning their Volksgeist in a supreme collective act of ‘national affirmation’ that will, once and for all, enable Quebec to meet the rest of Canada equal to equal, face to face, people to people.”
Jean Chrétien had refused to make concessions to Quebec. Only days before the vote, with the No side faltering, the prime minister relented in a televised address to the country: “We must recognize that Quebec’s language, its culture and institutions make it a distinct society. And no constitutional change that affects the powers of Quebec should ever be made without the consent of Quebeckers.”
The Globe takes stock of the referendum results on Oct. 31, 1995.
The referendum results rattled Canada to its core. The No side eked out a razor-thin victory of 50.6 per cent, besting the Yes side by a mere 54,000 votes. “No longer will Quebeckers, especially francophone Quebeckers, accept the federation status quo,” Séguin wrote. “Without major reforms, Canada’s crisis seems certain to continue.”
The Globe’s lead editorial on the result was categoric: “Whatever the method, change must come, as the Prime Minister and other leading federalists promised explicitly during the campaign that it would.”
Chrétien’s post-referendum approach to Quebec was more stick than carrot. Bouchard, who had replaced Parizeau as premier, insisted Quebec could unilaterally declare independence if the Yes side won a simple majority in a future referendum. The Chrétien government asked the Supreme Court of Canada to settle the matter. In 1998, it ruled that international law did not confer on Quebec a right to secede unilaterally, but that Ottawa and the other provinces would be required to negotiate Quebec’s secession if a “clear majority” of Quebeckers voted yes to “a clear question” on sovereignty.
Chrétien moved to entrench the court’s ruling in the 1999 Clarity Act, a provocative move that many federalists feared would generate a backlash in Quebec. Simpson summed up Ottawa’s strategy: “If you cannot woo Quebeckers, as Mr. Chrétien has failed to do, then trap them … He has produced a straitjacket from which the secessionists cannot escape.”
Chrétien’s tactic appeared to work; the sovereignty movement entered a period of decline. The 2018 election of the Coalition Avenir Québec, under former PQ cabinet minister François Legault, saw the province revert to an earlier form of nationalist affirmation reminiscent of the Duplessis era with a modern, secular twist. Like Duplessis, Legault has sought more autonomy for Quebec within Canada and governs the province in open defiance of federal norms.
In 2019, the CAQ approach yielded Bill 21, which prohibits public employees in a position of authority, including teachers, from wearing religious symbols. The CAQ sought to shield the law from a court challenge by pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause embedded in the 1982 Charter.
In keeping with its pluralist view, The Globe called the secularism law a denial of Quebec’s own history of accommodation, embodied in the 1774 Quebec Act that recognized the religious freedom of the colony’s Catholic majority: “Simply by accepting that people of different religions can nevertheless forge a shared identity, practising different faiths yet united in the same respect for the law and at the same love of country – what a radical, beautiful idea – Canada became possible.”
The CAQ’s use of the notwithstanding clause for a second time, adopting Bill 96 to strengthen French-language protections in 2022, drew a stiffer rebuke from The Globe. “It was always assumed that, if Quebec ever left Canada, it could only happen through the front door … Canada needs to recognize that the current government of Quebec is trying to tiptoe out the back door,” stated a May 25, 2022, editorial. “It is doing so by poking ever larger holes in Canada’s constitutional order, which protects fundamental rights, and replacing it with a parallel regime where the executive can curb rights and meddle in people’s lives with little to no judicial oversight.” This sounds like something a young George Brown might have written himself.
Whenever possible, The Globe has advocated for the accommodation of Quebec’s differences within the federation. It has not always been easy to square this circle in Charter-era Canada.
Konrad Yakabuski is a columnist at The Globe and Mail, based in Montreal.
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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that British trade commissioner James Cross lived near Westmount.