Canadians (11 page)

Canadians spend so much time spinning this Rubik's Cube of national identity that it has, from time to time, captured the attention of outsiders, usually Americans. At a Pittsburgh gathering of the Association of Canadian Studies a few years ago, Tom Barnes of the University of California suggested to a
Toronto Star
reporter that Canada needs to quit fretting so much. “Why all the angst, for God's sake?
Why? Why? Why?
”

At the time, Canadian bookstore shelves were featuring such titles as
Canada in Question, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, The Anxious Years,
and former prime minister Joe Clark's
A Nation Too Good to Lose
.

“How can you
lose
a nation?” Barnes asked.

Perhaps the question isn't so much losing it as finding it in the first place. No one seems to know exactly where to look. Or, for that matter, what to look for….

Yann Martel, whose
Life of Pi
won the 2002 Booker prize, described his country as the world's greatest “hotel” while stressing that, to him, it's one of the more admirable qualities of the nation. “You bring your own cultural baggage with you,” Martel said, “and the government provides room service, heat, water and, on television, those quaint Heritage Minutes.”

Even if he means no harm, I think Martel sells both the country and its citizens short, but much worse has been said. Richard Rodriguez, an American commentator, once told the Canadian Library Association that “Canada is the largest country in the world that doesn't exist.” Even some Canadians would say the equivalent. When Lucien Bouchard was premier of Quebec he once argued that “Canada is divisible because Canada is not a real country.”

Matt Jackson would beg to disagree.

Jackson is neither an academic nor a politician, but a hitchhiker. Not long ago he completed a four-year trek through this country, travelling by
thumb, car, truck, van, canoe, horseback, Twin Otter, and sail. When he returned to his Calgary home he published a small book of his photographs and notes, freely admitting that he'd been unable to find any simple and convenient definition.

“I think I had this grand notion when I set off,” Jackson told the
Calgary Herald,
“that I would cover the country and discover the Canadian identity. And really … I found that we're very different all over, so I don't know that there's one thing that ties everybody together completely…. I think that Canada is a lot more exotic than we give it credit for.”

My sentiments exactly.

Four

The Wind That Wants a Flag

“WHY ALL THE ANGST?” the academic from California asked.
“Why? Why? Why?”

Here's why—or at least part of the reason why. In the autumn following the demise of the Meech Lake Accord, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced the establishment of a Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future. The commission was struck in response to continued criticism over the manner in which constitutional reform had been handled. It would travel the country, hearing out what were called “ordinary Canadians.”

It became the catchphrase of the times and inadvertently underlined the very problem the political and media elite had stumbled up against in trying to push the accord through without the slightest thought of public input. To far too many supposedly intelligent observers, the term meant “stupid, dull citizens”—people with little education, no power and, for that matter, no personality. Ordinary. Unimportant. The masses. The very phrase, to the establishment, called up images of farmers with flat, uninteresting faces, suburban dwellers with insignificant jobs and dead imaginations, seniors with nothing to do but gripe, office workers more worried about their lawns than their jobs, truck drivers thinking about their next stop, taxi drivers who never shut up and never say anything, airport security workers bitching about who's late coming back from break….

It was a telling misread of their own country.

THAT THE PEOPLE were outraged by the Meech Lake process, and remained so, was undeniable in the fall and winter of 1990–91. There was a fury in “the peaceable kingdom.”

Looking back after so many years, the vitriol surprises me—even my own. “Angry” is not a word normally used to describe the daily column I have written now for four different newspapers. Stupid at times, insightful once in a while … sentimental, silly, sensible on a good day. But not “angry.” And yet, there it is right in the headline over the column I filed for the
Ottawa Citizen
on June 5, 1990: “The People Will Repay Our Devious Politicians.”

It was the week Mulroney and the Canadian premiers had come to Ottawa for one last-ditch push on the accord that was scheduled to become law on June 23, 1990, now less than three weeks away. Three years earlier the deal had begun as a worthy attempt to bring Quebec into the Constitution Act it had refused to sign in 1982. But in execution it had evolved into a firestorm of controversy as critics, including Pierre Trudeau, argued that “distinct society” status for Quebec would unravel the very idea of ten equal provinces joined together in Confederation.

By June 1990 the accord had come to symbolize an arrogance and an elitism that clearly rubbed the people the wrong way. It had become eleven men in suits deciding, behind closed doors, for an entire country that was denied any say at all. Those who were fronting the accord were saying it had no “egregious error” and couldn't possibly be opened to discussion. The lone premier who was balking, Newfoundland's Clyde Wells, was being beat up by the others to the point where the rumours around the Congress Centre had him in tears and on the verge of a mental collapse—merely because he dared challenge some of the premises behind the deal his predecessor had signed three years earlier.

Before the week was out, the prime minister—using everything from heartfelt persuasion to, some said, control over bathroom breaks— managed to get the premiers to push on to the final date for confirmation, though Wells had insisted on an asterisk to his signed agreement. Two days later, Mulroney, already accused of gambling with the future of the country, would hold his famous interview in which he likened the
constitutional gambit to knowing when to “roll the dice”—even further infuriating the people.

Canada seemed very much in the midst of one of those “cataclysmic events” that Andrew Malcolm suggested the country had somehow missed in its history.

The prime minister was saying Canada itself was at stake. And there was something about the arrogance of the closed meetings and the irrational sky-will-fall threats, something about that pretentious word “egregious,” that had seriously teed me off.

In that column I contended that the media was missing the story by concentrating on the prime minister, the premiers, their spin doctors, and the various scrums that took place in and around the Congress Centre. “The big story is out among the people,” I wrote, “and it is a tale of such fury and anger that God be with the first of these secretive and devious politicians that dares call an election and ask the people what they think about the way things have been going. Somewhere, sometime, the people will have their revenge.”

It did not take long to begin. The failure of Meech led directly to the emergence of the Bloc Québécois, when a handful of disenchanted members of Parliament, both Conservative and Liberal, decided to give up on Canada, combine forces, and work toward sovereignty for Quebec. Meanwhile, the anger “ordinary” Westerners felt was pivotal in the now-soaring fortunes of the Reform Party that had been founded in 1987. Parliament itself was about to change dramatically.

Before that first summer was out Ontario premier David Peterson, barely three years into his mandate, called a snap election—and was flattened by the New Democratic Party under Bob Rae. Some survived their next elections and some went down to crushing defeat, none quite so dramatically as the Conservative government itself. In the 1993 federal election the two great majorities of Brian Mulroney evaporated into a mere two seats; among the defeated was Kim Campbell, the leader who for a few short breaths had replaced Mulroney upon his retirement. None of the English-Canadian originals survived their support for the accord: within a little more than three years all were gone from office. It became known as “The Curse of Meech.”

Ordinary Canadians, it turned out, were in an extraordinary and lasting snit.

MULRONEY NAMED KEITH SPICER to chair the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future. Spicer had once been Commissioner of Official Languages and had gained more ink in that job—thanks, in no small part, to an equally brilliant young assistant named Michael Enright—than any commissioner since. It had been Spicer, with Enright's help, who had coined the phrase “Westmount Rhodesians” to make the point that for bilingualism to work, everyone had to buy into it.

Spicer was a genuine eccentric, equally capable of telling an off-colour joke as quoting Shakespeare at length. He could be charmingly and impossibly absent-minded. He'd hired me at the
Ottawa Citizen
four years earlier and, two weeks after the lunch that sealed the deal, did not know who I was when I showed up for work. He could play, by ear, dozens of national anthems on the piano. He was so devoted to an old floppy-eared mutt that, when it lost the ability to climb, he carried the dog in his arms up and down the stairs to his Sandy Hill apartment so that it could relieve itself several times a day. Spicer showed up at the
Citizen
office wearing a safari suit; he insisted on spending time in every possible facet of the paper; he once asked for a Greek headline over his own weekly column; and he basically gave everyone at the paper his or her own head to the point where it was openly questioned whether he himself even read the publication.

No matter; for some of us he could not have been a better boss— endlessly enthusiastic, open to any suggestion at all, no matter how expensive or how ludicrous. In many ways the newspaper thrived as never before, particularly after Spicer brought in the impossible-to-putup-with, impossible-to-put-down Marjorie Nichols as his main political columnist. He gave the paper a presence that stretched far beyond the bright yellow rural paper boxes of the Ottawa Valley.

Spicer had then moved on from the
Citizen
to chair the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the government's arm's-length broadcast regulator. He was a surprise choice to head up the new Citizens' Forum. Some said it was inspired—if Spicer was anything,
he was unpredictable—and some said it was a ploy, Spicer having been largely predisposed toward the Mulroney government while editor and having left for a government appointment at the CRTC.

Spicer himself would later write in
Life Sentences,
his 2004 memoir, that he was chosen for being the only high-profile Ottawa type “crazy enough” to take on such a “bizarre adventure.”

“Bizarre” would be a fair, if somewhat inadequate, description of what was to come.

Twelve commissioners were named to the Forum, with Spicer serving as chair and the other eleven representing the various regional concerns and special interests. The general notion, deliberately loose right from the opening announcement, was that the Forum would travel across the nation to listen to Canadians talk about their country and then take that message back to the federal government.

It would be a psychological report on the general state of a depressed nation.

It wasn't the first time such an analysis had been attempted. Following the shocking election of a sovereigntist government in Quebec on November 15, 1976, Ottawa had established a task force on unity headed by former cabinet minister Jean-Luc Pépin and former Ontario premier John Robarts. The report, which took months to prepare and cost millions, argued in favour of a classic federation, with constitutional recognition of Quebec's francophone reality and the extension of increased powers to all provincial governments. Critics tagged it a “dog's breakfast.” Robarts himself had all but admitted defeat, claiming “It was the best we could get.” The government of the day ignored it.

The announcement of the Forum was met with ridicule by those in the media who, by dint of time and station, had themselves become part of the very elite that had misread the country over the Meech Lake Accord. The Citizens' Forum was cast as just another foolish government venture to make it
appear
to be in touch; Spicer was ridiculed as too goofy to be taken seriously and too beholden to be feared. He would, if anything, produce a highly literate report that would become the parliamentary equivalent of
War and Peace
—unread even by those who meant to read it.

I have my own admission here. I chose the sneering route at the start and laughed continually at the commission that began with Spicer heading north in search of “poetry.” I started calling myself “Commissioner 13” and wrote columns that were intended to look like inter-office memos, Commissioner 13 sending briefing notes to the Chairman.

Knowing Spicer's freely admitted interest in women, particularly busty women, I early on supplied him with a list of strippers on their way to Ottawa—Busty Brittany and her 52EEs heading for Gypsy Rose's, L.A. Bust (65-22-32) coming to Barbarella's—and then compared those breasts with the far-less-endowed strippers working the capital in the weeks leading up to June 23, 1990, the day the Meech Lake Accord died. I think I made some ridiculous point about insecurity or something, but looking back at the column today I cringe to imagine what I was thinking, if anything at all. Sometimes columnists get desperate—perhaps that explains it as well as anything.

The Forum did not begin well, either. A Quebec commissioner resigned. A prospective British Columbia commissioner, well-known television broadcaster Jack Webster, bailed, claiming he was too busy with “other commitments.” Spicer convened an early closed-door session with a government pollster that seemed to go against the very spirit of the Forum and then unadvisedly told the media that “I don't think Canadians give a damn about how we organize our meetings.” Perhaps not, but the media sure did. There were instant rumours of disorganization and ballooning costs, which Spicer himself had joked would fall “somewhere between a shoestring and an orgy.”