Working the Dead Beat by Sandra Martin Page B

accommodations. Trudeau vociferously denounced the Accord in articles in the French and English press and in a lengthy interview with broadcaster Barbara Frum on CBC . Watching that interview now, with Frum at her persistent best, you have to admire (and wonder at) his steely logic, his confidence and ease with being the sole opponent to ten premiers; of course, he had been there before and won the day, albeit with some tough compromises, including the notwithstanding clause.
    Later, Ontario premier Bob Rae likened Trudeau to Isaiah Berlin’s concept of the hedgehog, an animal that knows one big thing. Political scientist Wayne Hunt, countered in “The Branding of Trudeau,” that Trudeau was a hedgehog who used the tactics of a fox, a sly animal that knows many things, to achieve his big goal of national unity.
    Trudeau’s opposition to Meech was delivered with chilling logic: there could not be “two Canadas” in the same country. Later, before a special joint committee of the Senate and the House, he spoke tenaciously for more than three hours about the Canada he had reinvigorated as “a federation that was set to last a thousand years,” until it fell “into the hands of a weakling [Mulroney]” who had “sold out” to the provinces. Trudeau’s fervent opposition, combined with regime changes in several provincial governments and growing resentment against a “special deal” for Quebec, precipitated the failure of the Accord to be ratified by its three-year deadline in 1990.
    Mulroney tried again with the Charlottetown Accord, which, unlike Meech, offered Canadians a referendum in order to express their opinions. Again Trudeau lashed on his battle gear, writing a denunciation in Maclean’s and delivering an impassioned speech at an event in La Maison du Egg Roll restaurant in Montreal, arguing that the new accord would lead to the destruction of the federal government and the disintegration of Canada, and saying that the “big mess deserves a big ‘no.’” And that’s what it got, in simultaneous referenda in Quebec and the rest of the country on October 26, 1992. Charlottetown was defeated by a vote of 54.3 percent to 45.7 percent, a difference of 8.6 percent. The failure of Meech and Charlottetown boosted the pro-sovereignty forces in Quebec.
    Trudeau bore a heavy cost for these constitutional victories. He was so demonized in Quebec, his native province, that he was asked to stay on the sidelines by the Non committee during the second Quebec sovereignty referendum, in 1995. That referendum, issued by Parti Québécois premier Jacques Parizeau, asked for support for sovereignty combined with a new economic and political partnership with the rest of Canada. Three days before the vote, the Non side organized a huge demonstration called the “unity rally” in the streets of Montreal with supporters hitchhiking, busing, and driving from across the country to profess their love of a united country. Nobody asked Trudeau to speak at the 100,000-strong gathering about Canadian unity, his “magnificent obsession,” or even to “join the current leaders on stage,” as John English reports in Just Watch Me . “Alone and rejected, the once fiery orator watched the massive rally in the square below his office window at Heenan Blaikie’s office, perched high above Boulevard René Lévesque . . .” The vote, which occurred on October 30, 1995, was desperately close. The pro-sovereignty side was defeated by 50.58 percent to 49.42 percent, a shadowy margin of just over 1 percent. Afterward, a bitter Parizeau blamed the loss on “money and the ethnic vote.”
    The last time Trudeau emerged from private life was heartbreaking. He appeared as a desolate father mourning the death of his youngest son. Michel Trudeau, twenty-three, was killed in an avalanche while on a skiing expedition with friends in Kokanee