When it comes to Quebec, down with Joe Clarkism

WILLIAM JOHNSON
G&M Thursday, August 8, 2002

Joe Clark is (almost; probably; unless things change; who knows?) history. But will Joe Clarkism stick around after Joe's gone? Will the main blockage to reuniting the Conservative tradition remain embedded in the Conservative Party?

Mr. Clark opposed the reference to the Supreme Court of Canada on whether Quebec had the right to secede unilaterally, opposed the Clarity Act asserting the rule of law should Quebec try to secede, said he'd rescind the Clarity Act if elected prime minister, asserted, without condition, that Canada accepted Quebec's right to secede.

Earlier, he negotiated the Charlottetown accord, repudiated by both Quebec and the rest of Canada, and said in 1994 that "Quebec cannot accept the status quo in Canada, and, indeed, the changes proposed in both the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown accord will not now be enough to give Quebec reasonable confidence that it can flourish in Canada."

On becoming prime minister in 1979, he appointed to the Senate his adviser on the Constitution, Arthur Tremblay, who, from 1971 to 1976, had been Quebec's deputy minister of intergovernmental affairs and the strategist for Quebec's attempt to wrest control over communications from the federal government and to set up a common front of the premiers to prevent Pierre Trudeau from patriating the Constitution. Mr. Tremblay later voted Yes in a referendum on secession.

But Mr. Clark was not unique. He reflected the changed attitude of the Tories after John Diefenbaker was succeeded in 1967 by Robert Stanfield -- for whom a young Mr. Clark served as special assistant before he was himself elected to Parliament in 1972. The party implicitly endorsed the policy of Marcel Faribault, Mr. Stanfield's Quebec lieutenant in the 1968 election, who campaigned on a platform that Canada had to be reconstituted as "two nations": Quebec and the rest of Canada.

Mr. Stanfield, with Brian Mulroney as his man in Quebec, built up the party in Quebec around more or less declared separatists such as Marcel Masse (who in 1995 was to preside over a committee set up by the Parti Québécois to define how Quebec would secede), Richard LeHir (later a PQ minister) and René Daviault (a Péquiste who had set up many PQ riding associations and who proceeded to set up 58 riding associations for the Tories).

As prime minister, Mr. Mulroney favoured Quebec in the allotting of contracts (notably to service the CF-18 fighter jets in Montreal over Winnipeg), used separatist Lucien Bouchard as his speechwriter and later Quebec lieutenant, reopened the constitutional wars with the Meech Lake accord, and had his party's convention pass this in 1991: "Be it resolved that the recognition of the right of Quebec men and women to self-determination be confirmed." On his watch, support for separatism in Quebec, negligible when he took office, reached beyond 60 per cent.

Kim Campbell then won the leadership with the backing of the most nationalist Quebec ministers. Her successor, Jean Charest, opposed the reference to the Supreme Court, claimed that the court's carefully reasoned answer merely left "a black hole," and supported Quebec's right to secede.

After he left Ottawa for Quebec, Mr. Charest said in the leaders' debate during the 1998 Quebec election campaign: "In the House of Commons, I stood up with the members of my caucus to vote for a resolution moved by the Bloc Québécois which said that Quebec alone had the right to decide its future. . . . I did that out of conviction, because those are my beliefs."

wjohnson@globeandmail.ca