Interpreting Quebec’s Exile Within the Federation

Front matter

Guy Laforest with the collaboration of Oscar Mejia Mesa

Selected Political Essays

IVERSITAS

Introduction

Interpreting Québec’s Exile within the Federation: Selected Political Essays, by Guy Laforest with the collaboration of Oscar Mejia Mesa... 13 CHAPTER 1 I. Pierre Trudeau, the Exile of Québecers, and the Charter... 22 Ws, “HOH the ExXe v4 goes is dec seston dvanssecoaecvtalsdes veuteahdacdstahadaidees case tee 25 CONCIUSION ER secre eee rene E AEAEE EEEE 28 CHAPTER 2 Conclusione srren en nre ne I emilee eae anes 36 CHAPTER 3 Making Sense of Canada as a Federal System: The Relevance I. Historical Legacies: Their Nature, Role, Interrelations, Conclusie ssn Seve Men aE ET EEES 57 CHAPTER 4

The Historical and Legal Origins of Asymmetrical Federalism in Canada’s Founding Debates: A Brief

Interpretive NOÉC:2::2. rare onenn an ees ee acdsee eek 59 CONCIUSION Er en eee E R 64

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6 Lord Durham, French Canada, and Québec: Remembering the Past, Debating the Future... 91 I. Coming to Terms with Lord Durham’s Report in French Canada and Québec... 93

II. Janet Ajzenstat’s Introduction: Debating Lord Durham’s Influence on Canada and Assessing

Him as a Human Being and as a Thinker eee eee eeeeeteeeteeeee 98 MI. A Critical Hermeneutics for the Present and for the Future: rennes tree renier 102 CONCIUSION ES tn errant ere EE EE ESS 108 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 More Distress than Enchantment: The Constitutional Te CUS CS RS nn de ea 124 II. Assessing the Behaviour of Participants... 126 IL, Conséquences. saccavedasaesveussaedansueubs Seaseeseuadeciudeis ii 137 Conclusie eee A nm de cree tn dattes ere 139 CHAPTER 9

The Canadian State and the Political Freedom of Québec: The Ideas of James Tully

I. Canada’s Political-Constitutional Identity and Québec’s Situation... 143 II. The Philosophical Approaches of James Tully IT. From a Straightjacket to a Reworking of Democratic IV. Michel Seymour S Critici Sii er n en en e 159 V. Overall Consideration of the Theses in Light CONCLUSIONS. re needed N O 168

CHAPTER 10

Acknowledgements

This book owes a lot to the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales (GRSP), led by my colleague and friend Alain-G. Gagnon at the Université du Québec a Montréal. This research group, founded in 1994, currently includes the following colleagues: Eugénie Brouillet, Dean of Law, and Jocelyn Maclure, from the Faculty of Philosophy, at my host institution Université Laval; Dimitri Karmis, André Lecours, and François Rocher from the Ecoles d’études politiques (School of Political Studies) at the Université d’Ottawa; José Woehrling, from the Faculty of Law at the Université de Montréal; Genevieve Nootens, from the Département de sciences humaines (Department of Human Sciences) at the Université du Québec a Chicoutimi; and, James Tully, from the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria. The GRSP has had various grants over the years from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Fonds de recherche du Québec — Société et culture. These grants have been instrumental for researching and writing many of the chapters found in this book. I am grateful to both granting agencies. I have also benefited from the support of my own institution, through the Aid to Publication Program of the Faculté des sciences sociales at l’Université Laval. I also want to express my thanks for this support.

As this book’s front page suggests, I have benefited immensely from the support of Oscar Mejia Mesa, one of my doctoral students, who read all chapters and made many suggestions in both form and substance. This book would not have seen the light of day without him. I also wish to thank Marc Woons, FWO doctoral fellow with the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leuven, for an insightful linguistic revision and for his many substantive suggestions.

I wish to warmly thank Alain-G. Gagnon for welcoming my work into this collection. His generosity at key moments has been decisive for me.

As always, thanks to my wife Andrée Lapointe and to my three children Isabelle, Vincent, and Raphaél, who make me a happy person.

Guy Laforest

INTRODUCTION Interpreting Québec’s Exile Within the Federation Selected Political Essays

I often repeat, half-seriously, that I am a historian of ideas and a teacher of political philosophy, hidden in a political science department. At all Québec universities, as in the rest of North America, much of the business of political science has to do with positivistic approaches, quantitative methods, and rational choice theories for explaining social behaviour. Within the discipline, I belong to the minority methodological and epistemological position. To make sense of politics, I believe one has to rely on an interdisciplinary approach. The insights of philosophy, history, literature, sociology, and law can all enrich the search for coherent and meaningful interpretations of political events, phenomena, and doctrines. Such a combination forms the spirit or, as the Germans say, Geist of a humanistic approach to the study of politics. This book is one example of doing political science in such a way, applied to the task of interpreting the situation of Québec and of Québecers within the Canadian federation.

The book belongs squarely to the discipline of political science with chapters studying the theory and practice of Canadian federalism, as well as analysing various aspects of nationalism in Québec. It borrows heavily from the domain of constitutional law in chapters dealing with Canada’s fundamental laws of 1867 and 1982. Intellectual history has always fascinated me, and I hope that readers who share my interest will appreciate the chapters that deal with the figures such as Lord Durham, Gérard Bouchard, Charles Taylor, James Tully, and Michel Seymour. For those who prefer sociology and philosophy, the book contains chapters on political and social integration, trust and mistrust, political freedom, and complex equality. Internal exile, distress, and enchantment are also of course literary notions, and such ideas play a central role in my reflections.

Much of Western civilization would continue to exist if Québec and Canada were obliterated from the surface of the earth. Our political existence thus takes place at the margins of History and at the periphery of dominant nation-states such as the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. I nevertheless believe that our political history, with its drama and its problems, can inform political science as a discipline and the international community’s learned public sphere. For thirty years, I have lectured about this history and about these lessons at most universities in Québec and across Canada. Even in our current circumstances of growing indifference between our societies and scholarly communities, I believe that the conversation must be sustained and that efforts must be made to bridge gaps in our reciprocal understandings. The essays brought together in this book represent another personal effort towards attaining this goal.

The first chapter explains its title and goes to the heart of the situation facing Québecers and their place within the Canadian federation. In 1954, Maurice Lamontagne, the late Canadian senator and Université Laval economist, argued that Québec’s situation within Canada is hybrid and ambiguous (Lamontagne 1954). Sixty years later, his reflections still make sense. Geography and the fundamentals of the Canadian constitutional framework are here to stay. Nevertheless, Québec remains awkwardly integrated into the country as a whole. Québec as a political community, and Québecers as citizens and political actors, thus seem to me to be in a situation of internal exile. After explaining at greater length what this notion entails, I attempt to identify the precise changes that could be made to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to remedy this situation. The first time I evoked this idea, a few years ago at a Trudeau Foundation event in Winnipeg, some civil servants from the federal Department of Justice told me that it was the first time, in a couple of decades, that they had heard such specific suggestions. I believe that Québec”’s self-representation as an intercultural nation should be affirmed in the Charter’s core. It should also be used as an interpretive principle linked to the understanding of the concept of reasonable limits to rights and liberties in the first section of the Charter, in its linguistic regime (sections 16 to 23), and, finally, in its disposition related to promoting the multicultural heritage of Canadians.

My ideas concerning the contemporary challenges and utility of federalism are straightforwardly presented in the second chapter. I revised these pages in the weeks following the death of Richard Simeon, one of Canada’s preeminent scholars of federalism, who passed away on October 11, 2013. He will be sorely missed. In both of Canada’s official languages, with rigour, subtlety, and respect for dissent, Simeon spent forty years putting his brilliant mind to the task of researching the theory, practice, and machinery of federalism in Canada and the world. He promoted the virtues of dialogue and reciprocal understanding. He played an instrumental role in developing the language of trade-offs in the relationships between Anglophones and Francophones and between Canada’s and Québec’s national projects. In the coming years — and in particular at a colloquium taking place in mid-October 2014 in Québec

Introduction

City commemorating the 150" anniversary of the Québec Conference of 1864 that led to the Dominion of Canada three years later, which is being organized by Eugénie Brouillet (the Dean of Law at Laval), Alain-G. Gagnon (UQAM Political Scientist), and myself — we hope to have many opportunities to pay homage to Simeon’s work.' We often debated the fact that, although I believe that he was right in arguing that provinces profit from high legal, political, jurisdictional, fiscal and bureaucratic capacity, our political system nevertheless remains highly centralized mostly in the organization and management of intergovernmental affairs and in the workings of the judicial branch of government. We last discussed these matters at a conference organized in 2011 by Michael Burgess and Cesar Colino at Howfield Manor, near Canterbury, on the English soil where he was born. The topic of the conference dealt with historical legacies crucial to understanding federal regimes — the topic of the third chapter.

In 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada, in its Reference re Secession of Québec, made an insightful contribution to the discussion concerning Canada’s most important historical legacies. It suggested that our political and constitutional order has four foundational principles: federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule and law, and respect for the rights of minorities. Readers will find a deeper analysis of the Supreme Court’s judgment in a later chapter of this book interpreting the ideas of James Tully and Michel Seymour. Although I would never deny the Supreme Court’s authority, I propose a supplementary reading on the topic of historical legacies in the third chapter. First, I identify various dimensions of Canada’s past and present British heritage. I then attempt to delineate the idea of the centrality of the state for the development of an original national project, in the shadow of the United States. Hopefully, readers will agree that I talk about the same country as the Supreme Court. They will also note some nuances and differences. In agreement with the Supreme Court, I recognize that federalism, or the principle of autonomy, represents one of Canada’s key historical legacies. However, contrary to the Supreme Court, I do not believe that, either at the time of the founding or later on in the evolution of the country, it has ever been the equivalent of the Star of Bethlehem guiding our political leaders. On the topic of federalism in Canada, I also discuss the various tensions and interpretive prisms that were central to Simeon’s scholarly endeavours.

The colloquium’s program can be downloaded at the following internet address: http:// www.conferencedequebec.org/. The colloquium belongs to the research program of the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales, whose scientific director is Alain-G. Gagnon at the Université du Québec in Montréal. The colloquium is sponsored by the Government of Québec’s Secrétariat aux affaires intergouvernementales canadiennes (SAIC).

Finally, and hopefully less obliquely than the Supreme Court, I examine the Janus-faced dimensions of Québec for the Canadian national project. In my judgment, it is crucial never to forget that Québec simultaneously reassures and threatens the very idea of a distinct and united Canada. This leads me to explore the topics of English-French duality in Canada and of the centrality of the state for Québec in the pursuit of its own national project.

Astute political leaders and thinkers can make these national projects compatible. I argue in the fourth chapter, discussing the historical and legal origins of asymmetrical federalism in and around the British North America Act, 1867 (now the Constitution Act, 1867), that our founders possessed such astuteness. Meeting at Brock University in the spring of 2014, under the presidency of my colleague and friend Alain Noél from the Université de Montréal, the Canadian Political Science Association organized a panel on the ideas of Janet Ajzenstat, whose work in political theory and constitutional history is indispensable to understanding the spirit of our founding (Ajzenstat 2014). The Canadian political experiment is linked to a complex issue that has long troubled Ajzenstat: the question of whether or not liberal universalism can be reconciled with particularism (see, also, Ajzenstat 1999; LaSelva 1995; Burelle 2005; Noël 2006). I lay the historical ground for attempting to answer this question with regards to Québec’s situation within Canada.

If the federal principle played a significant part in the advent of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, it has had a complex and storied evolution in Québec throughout the 20" century (see Gagnon 2009; Karmis and Rocher 2012). Many people, including myself, have lamented the disengagement of Québec from Canada over the last decade. Chapter five examines the renewed interest in the study of federalism in Québec at the start of the 21" century. It is only fair to recognize the leadership of André Pratte, chief editorialist at La Presse, in this endeavour (Pratte 2007).? This chapter discusses the writings of various historians, philosophers, political scientists, and legal experts such as Eugénie Brouillet, Alain Noël, Jean Leclair, François Rocher, Alain-G. Gagnon, Michel Seymour, Marie-Bernard Meunier, Pierre-Gerlier Forest, Stephane Dion, and André Burelle. I owe a great deal to another colleague and friend, Francois Rocher, who, like Simeon (who repeated the argument at various conferences sponsored by the Forum of Federations), believes that in complex federations scholars of federalism from the majority nation tend

André Pratte played a key role in creating a new think tank on federalism in Québec called L’idée fédérale/The Federal Idea. He remains its president. See their website at the following internet address: http://www. ideefederale.ca/index_a.php.

Introduction to favour the goal of unity and the strategy of integration, while scholars from the minority nation favour the goal of autonomy and the strategy of empowerment (Rocher 2009, 121).

The next chapter is an attempt to come to terms with the emblematic historical figure of Lord Durham. A first version of this text was prepared for the re-edition of the Durham Report by McGill-Queen’s University Press under Janet Ajzenstat’s leadership in 2007. After summarizing Lord Durham’s personal trajectory and political thought, I reassess the evolving interpretation of his famous report in French Canada and Québec. One finds here at work the twin poles of my approach to the study of politics, combining intellectual history with political theory to create a dynamic of reciprocal enrichment and elucidation. For a good many years, at the Université Laval, my courses on nationalism included a comparative section devoted to examining and comparing the case of Québec with those of Scotland and Catalonia. This remains highly relevant in light of Scotland’s referendum on independence being held on September 18, 2014 and the continuous deterioration of the relationships between the Spanish and Catalan national projects. However, interpreting the Durham Report has led me to explore new comparative horizons in Central and Eastern Europe, looking at how the cases of Poland and Hungary, among others, relate to nationalism in Québec. In all these cases the central challenge remains, repeating the apt formula of the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, constructing a just and happy national historical memory. This must be done in a critical manner, simultaneously keeping at a fair distance the sirens of post-nationalism and of anti-nationalism. In these matters, interpreting the Durham Report will always be a test and a crucial task.

The seventh chapter of the book takes stock of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission and its final report entitled Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation (Bouchard and Taylor 2008). In 2007-2008, the Commission explored key issues related to managing diversity in Québec, concentrating on the relationships between the French-Canadian majority’s heritage and that of religious and cultural minorities. This work is obviously related to the more recent debate on the adoption of a Québec Charter of Values, introduced in the late summer of 2013 by the former Parti Québécois government led by Pauline Marois. There is no doubt in my mind — a rare occurrence — that the task of defining political judgment in Québec, on difficult matters related to integration and the place of religion in the public sphere, consists in finding balance between consideration for our particular situation in North America, on the one hand, and the ideals of justice and the principles of liberal democracy, on the other hand. I belong to a family of thinkers who argue that such is the leitmotif of Québec’s entire historical trajectory (see Gagnon 2011; Létourneau 2006; Thériault 2002). I try to go beyond the Report to understand its place in the intellectual evolution of each of its two co-presidents, Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor.

If it does make sense to characterize the situation of Québec and its citizens within Canada as a form of internal exile, this has much to do with the constitutional negotiations of November 1981, which led to the patriation of the Constitution in 1982. I have written extensively about this but, to reassure the readers, I hope I am doing it in an original way in the eighth chapter of this book (Laforest 1995a). Relying substantially on the writings of André Burelle, one of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s former advisors and speechwriters, whose works should be translated into English and published, I first explore the causes and consequences of those fateful events of 1981-1982. With Burelle’s help, I try to provide a better grasp of Trudeau’s role and his various motivations during the whole affair. So far, one could say, there is nothing particularly new here. I do enter new ground in evaluating René Lévesque and his Parti Québécois government’s share of responsibility for events that took place between 1976 and 1985. In a previous book, I established a comparison between the rebellions of 1837-1838, considered as the failed rebellions of an imperial age, and the referendums of 1980 and 1995, seen as the failed rebellions of a democratic era (Laforest 2004, 332-333). Over the long run, I view this pattern as a tragic dimension of our history. From La Fontaine to Cartier, between 1841 and 1867, many rebels of 1837-1838 were able at least to attenuate (in the mind of pessimists), and possibly also bypass (in the mind of optimists), the consequences of our failed 19° century rebellions. If the Meech Lake Accord had seen the constitutional light of day, at any moment between 1987 and 1990, I surmise that we would have entered into a similar dynamic. In contemporary Québec, could political figures such as the new premier, Philippe Couillard, and the leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec, François Legault, play roles similar to those of La Fontaine and Cartier in the 19" century? As I write these lines in early May 2014, I have not completely abandoned all hope for such changes during my lifetime. Of course, with regards to interpreting our key constitutional struggles, I recognize that all this remains open to debate. I claim no imperial interpretive authority (for related views, see Gagnon 2011; Webber 1993; LaSelva 1995; Millard 2008).

Beyond the horizons of politicians, historians, legal scholars, and political scientists, the last decades have also seen philosophers do their fair share to understand Québec’s quest for greater political freedom within Canada’s constitutional order. James Tully, formerly from McGill and now teaching at the University of Victoria, and Michel Seymour, from the Université de Montréal, are two of the most prominent and rigorous

Introduction of these philosophers. The ninth chapter explores the issue of Québec’s freedom within Canada. Tully (with Charles Taylor) supervised my thesis at McGill and I cannot overstate the size of my debt to him.*? Seymour is one of the most brilliant and sympathetic colleagues of my generation, and I consider his book on toleration and recognition to be the best political theory book written by either a Québecer or by a Canadian in the 21“ century. Both remain my friends. In looking at their work, I ask whether the Canadian constitution is a straightjacket for Québec. How should we integrate recent Supreme Court jurisprudence into any discussion of these matters? Does the Clarity Act make a difference? Tully has in many instances attempted to answer at least some of these questions, and Seymour has been quite critical of Tully. I discuss their respective views before moving on to some conclusions of my own.

When I started teaching political science at the University of Calgary almost thirty years ago, Stephen Harper was a graduate student in the Department of Economics where he was already quite involved in Canadian politics. During my stay in Calgary, he worked hard, with others, to found the Reform Party in 1987. In 2014, after almost a decade in power, he stands as the most powerful and successful Canadian politician of the early 21* century. In the book’s tenth and last chapter, I explore the uneasy relationship between Harper and Québec, which hovers between various shades of trust and mistrust. Considering the hopes that existed during the years characterized by Harper’s open federalism (or, better put, federalism of openness) between 2005 and 2007, it is understandable that the current Prime Minister should feel disappointed with the performance of his party in Québec. However, as I argue in the chapter, there have been many collisions between Harper and successive Québec governments on policy matters over the last few years. Moreover, Québecers do not seem to be very influential in his inner circle, with the current exception of Denis Lebel, his Québec lieutenant. What should Harper do for Québecers and Québec authorities so that they trust him more? I cannot speak for others, so I only speak for myself. In late November 2006, the House of Commons passed a motion, presented by Stephen Harper, stating “that this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada”.* The use of the French word, Québécois (instead of the English equivalent, Québecers or Québeckers), systematically used by

In late April 2014 in Montréal, the Groupe de recherche sur les sociétés plurinationales organized, under the leadership of Dimitrios Karmis (Université d’Ottawa) and Jocelyn Maclure (Université Laval), a major conference on Tully’s political thought: http://www.evenements.uqam.ca/?com=detail&elD=414436.

See the CBC News (2006) story entitled “House passes motion recognizing Québécois as nation.”

Québec governments when it addresses itself to all citizens of Québec notwithstanding their origin, represents, in my judgement, an indirect attempt to reduce the population concerned to those of French-Canadian ethnic descent, as was frequently done at the peak of our constitutional struggles by those who advocated the partition of a sovereign Québec and its reduction, essentially, to the North Shore of the Saint Lawrence River between Baie-Comeau and the east end of the Island of Montréal. If Harper meant to recognize all of us living in Québec as part of the Québec nation, he should say so explicitly.

For a similar argument, see Bercuson and Cooper (2002). The first edition of this book was published in 1991. Bercuson and Cooper teach at the University of Calgary, and, like Harper, they belong to the intellectual vanguard of the new conservatism that came from Western Canada in the 1980s. To the best of my knowledge, Harper has never clearly said who exactly he wanted to recognize in 2006. He should. The harsh tone of Bercuson and Cooper has not disappeared from our public sphere. Conservative guru Brian Lee Crowley also writes in the spirit of their Deconfederation essay. See one of his recent opinions in the Postmedia Network at http://www.macdonaldlaurier.ca/ crowley-in-the-citizen-toward-greater-clarity-on-Québec/

CHAPTER |

I begin this chapter on a personal note. More than thirty years ago, when the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms came into effect, I was living in Montréal and studying at McGill University. Among my professors were two great intellectuals who were also great idealists, Charles Taylor and James Tully.' I learned much from them, and, over time, they became friends. Other professors influenced me perhaps less directly though just as meaningfully, namely Blema Steinberg, Daniel Latouche, James Mallory, and Harold Waller. Their approach was tinged with realism, which perfectly supplemented Taylor and Tully’s approach. In philosophy, the realist approach is that of liberalism without illusions as expounded by Judith Shklar, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper. In politics, according to these authors, one must first and foremost avoid the worst and must understand that cruelty, fear, terror, and violence can crush a person and attack his or her dignity and privacy. In this respect, I share the judgment of Irvin Studin, who wrote that Canada is a tremendous success on the scale of humanity. As a country, it is among the most “peaceful, just and civilized” (Studin 2006, 184). A country where, to add my own voice, the strong as well as the weak can sleep soundly in a decent, comfortable, and humane social environment without fear of the worst. All of this counts, therefore, as a tremendous development in the history of humankind.

I start on this note because I want to provide a sense of proportion for the analysis that will be developed regarding the internal exile of Québecers in the Canada of the Charter. Like a number of other people in Québec, in terms of political identity and belonging, I am not a happy citizen in the Canada of the Charter (see Burelle 1994; Dufour 2000). Beyond my personal feelings, I think this is explained by the fact that Québec is not properly integrated into the new Canada that has arisen since the constitutional reforms of 1982. Paradoxically, these reforms saw the light of day, to a large extent, due to the dynamism and pressure

For other analyses inspired by Taylor and Tully, see Gagnon (2007) and Laforest (2004).

exerted by Québec on Canada in the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution. This chapter will argue that instead of improving the situation, the 1982 constitutional reforms worsened it and resulted in the internal exile of Québecers within the Canada of the Charter. The term internal exile describes very well the basis of my thoughts — someone who is exiled from the inside is someone who feels uncomfortable and who lives like a stranger in his or her own country.

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section argues that the first thirty years of the Charter led to the exile of Québecers within Canada. The Trudeau vision of the constitution embraced Canadian sovereignty as the means of challenging Québec nationalism and this led to the end of the Canadian dream that was created through the Confederation of the British North American colonies in 1867. The second section contends that the exile of Québecers can be ended by amending the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to recognize the distinct status of Québec within section 1, the reasonable limits clause, and section 27, the interpretive clause that requires the Charter to be applied in a manner consistent with Canada’s multicultural heritage. The final section reflects on the Charter’s virtues, concluding that its implementation without the consent of the Québec National Assembly represents, to invoke Donald Smiley (1983, 78, 90), a dangerous deed — one that led to the internal exile of Québecers within Canada in the era of the Charter and that continues to be a fundamental obstacle to Canada being a just federal society.

I. Pierre Trudeau, the Exile of Québecers, and the Charter

And once again, it means an even greater tendency, a greater weight on the side of provincialism, at the expense of a federal institution or legislation which, up until now, has given Canadians a feeling of belonging to one Canada. In the same way, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was important to Canadian unity, as were the patriation of the Constitution and the new Canadian flag. All of those things are important in the sense that they help Canadians to realize that they share with all other Canadians, throughout the country, the same set of fundamental values (Trudeau 1990a, 31).

The internal exile of Québecers is made immensely more complex if we add the dominant role played by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, undoubtedly one of the greatest political figures of Québec and Canada in the 20" century. In terms of belonging and identity, Québecers were to some extent exiled by one of their own. Federalism held an important position in Trudeau’s life, except that a study of his actions and writings in the 1980s, juxtaposed against the overall horizon of his political-intellectual life, reveals him to be a nationalist and a Canadian sovereigntist more than a federalist. This is clearly illustrated in an important book that André Burelle (2005), philosopher and at one time a speechwriter for the former prime minister, devoted to Trudeau’s work. I will return to Burelle’s analysis in a moment.

At the end of his career, Trudeau dreamed of cementing once and for all the sovereignty of both the Canadian nation and the central government. In the debate over the Meech Lake Accord, he often wondered: “How do you make a country stronger by weakening the only government that can talk for all Canadians?” (Trudeau 1990b, 94). Rather than trying to find in federalism and its institutions a balance between a design for a Canadian nation and a Québec nation, he decided after the 1980 referendum to resort to Canadian nationalism to change the country and to prevail over Québec sovereigntists definitively.” The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was the instrument of such a plan, as political scientist Alan Cairns recalled in an interview with the historian Robert Bothwell: