Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin

rights such as freedom of expression and religion.
    All the provinces agreed, and then Robert Bourassa got chilblains after he returned home and was pilloried by politicial allies and opponents for giving away too much. He called Trudeau, reneged on the verbal agreement, and so the proposal foundered. Trudeau blamed the electoral victory of the Parti Québécois five years later and Brian Mulroney’s Meech Lake Accord in the late 1980s on Bourassa, because the Quebec premier had denied his province an opportunity to sign on to a constitutional accord when he had the chance. “Much of Bourassa’s subsequent career,” Trudeau wrote in his Memoirs , “has been spent trying to regain what he was once so unwise as to refuse.”
    After the Liberals were defeated by Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives in the May 1979 election, Trudeau announced that he was retiring from politics. Quebec premier René Lévesque, leader of the separatist Parti Québécois, who had campaigned on offering Quebeckers a referendum on separation, thought he would have an easier time winning it with Trudeau out of power and sped up his agenda.
    Fate intervened. The minority Clark government was defeated on a budget amendment in December 1979, only seven months after taking office, and Trudeau came roaring out of retirement — a convention had not yet been held to choose his successor — to lead the Liberals into the subsequent election. “Welcome to the 1980s,” Trudeau quipped on election night, February 18, 1980, having trounced Clark’s Progressive Conservatives 147 seats to 103, although his majority mandate was lopsided, with no seats west of Manitoba, in contrast with the distribution in the 1968 election.
    An emboldened Trudeau, knowing this mandate would probably be his last, focused on the issues that mattered most to him and that in the end guaranteed his legacy. First among them was the referendum, and that led to ferocious public confrontations between Trudeau and Lévesque over the future of the country.
    At a massive rally in the Paul Sauvé Arena in east-end Montreal — the same venue where the Parti Québécois had celebrated its election victory in 1976 — Trudeau, in full gunslinger mode, delivered a devastating speech, only six days before the referendum vote scheduled for May 20, 1980. He promised to reform the Canadian constitution if the Non side won. He was deliberately vague about the terms, allowing many Québécois to assume that he was planning to accede to their aspirations — a conclusion he said later was not “logical,” based on his persistent stand against “special status.” The secessionists were defeated 59.56 percent to 40.44 percent, a decisive 20 percent margin. “ À la prochaine fois ,” a dispirited Lévesque said to his distraught supporters, from the stage of the very same arena where Trudeau had held his Non rally.
    After the defeat of the referendum, Trudeau moved quickly to restart the constitutional talks by meeting with the premiers in Ottawa and giving them a twelve-point agenda. The eleven governments negotiated all summer and assembled at a First Ministers’ Conference in Ottawa in September. Nobody could agree on a deal. Ever the samurai, Trudeau determined to go it alone. In October he unveiled what came to be called the “People’s Package.” After approval by the House and the Senate, the patriation proposal would be sent directly to Westminster. It proposed a modified version of the amending formula that had been accepted in Victoria 1971 and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
    Much had changed on the political landscape in the ensuing decade, however, including the election of a separatist premier of Quebec. Ontario and New Brunswick accepted the resolution, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia reserved judgement, and the remaining six provinces — an unlikely combination that