I'd say that's a 'no': Canada hangs together

Commonweal, Dec 4, 1992 by Jordan Bishop

Two days before Canadians went to the polls on October 26 to vote on the framework for a new constitutional agreement, Canadian newspapers and broadcasters had already begun a postmortem on the referendum. Known as the "Charlottetown Accord," the agreement had been worked out among federal and provincial political leaders at a meeting held last August 28 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. It had the support of Canada's three major political parties--the Liberals, the Progressive Conservatives, and the New Democrats--associations of business leaders, the Canadian Labor Congress, most of the media in English Canada, and a large array of public figures. Opposing it were the separatist Parti Quebecois, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), a strong sector of youth from the ruling Quebec Liberal party, the fight-wing populist Reform party, a varied assortment of dissidents, trade unions, and Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Early in the six-week campaign it was pointed out that there was no single NO. Judy Rebick, the fiery leftist leader of NAC, campaigned vigorously for the N0 side. She and the NAC leadership felt the accord had been worked out without the participation of women and gave them nothing. She saved dissidents from having their NO vote identified with either Preston Manning, leaderof the right-wing Reform party, or with Jacques Parizeau of the Parti Quebecois. Pundits appear to agree now that the NO vote came from six or seven different directions at once, and that it represented an anti-establishment mood in the country. This mood was, paradoxically, reinforced by a widespread popular reaction against a heavy, slick, and well-funded advertising blitz for the YES side. A Saskatchewan cartoonist caught the mood exactly: one pollster says to another, both standing in front of a bungalow as a television set comes crashing out the window: "I'd say that's a N0."

Canadians apparently wanted reasoned argument. They got more of it from the N0 campaign. One French language commentator attributed Trudeau's impact to the fact that he made his case for a NO vote with a point-by-point analysis of the agreement. Both the Parti Quebecois and the Reform party published annotated texts of the accord. Many observers had already noted that the agreement--a political compromise covering the allocation of federal and provincial powers, aboriginal self'government, the recognition of Quebec as a "distinct society," and a brand new Senate with eight members from each province-- was far too complex for a simple 'YES/NO decision.

During the campaign, supporters of both the YES and NO options urged their people to "hold their noses and vote." This implied, for YES supporters, that the seriously-flawed agreement was the best that could be hoped for; for the NO side, it implied that progressives in English Canada would have to join forces with the Reform party, and that conservatives would have to vote with the likes of Judy Rebick and the separatist Parti Quebecois.

When the vote came, the accord was strongly supported by Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. In Ontario, the YES vote carried by the narrowest of margins: 49.8 to 49.6 percent. It was concentrated in Ottawa and Toronto. Rural, southwestern, and northern Ontario--the latter with a strong aboriginal and francophone population--voted decisively NO. Nova Scotia voted NO in a nearly tied vote. In Quebec, only the island of Montreal, with its strong anglophone and immigrant minorities, and western Quebec, voted 'YES. The rest of the province was resolutely opposed, as were Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and the Yukon. The final vote nationwide was 53.7 percent NO, 45.3 percent YES.

The campaign revealed a massive disenchantment with the political leadership of the country. Even within aboriginal communities--many of whose leaders had fought hard to get aboriginal self-government formalized in the constitution--the N0 vote ran from 60 to 70 percent. This, however, may have reflected less a mistrust of aboriginal leadership than a mistrust of the establishment-sanctioned political process.

Quebec, as always, was unique. While Jacques Panzeau, leader of the Parti Quebecois, was head of the Quebec NO Committee, there was also a strong group of young dissident Liberals ranged around Jean Aliaire, who had led the Quebec Liberal party's commission on constitutional reform. And while the Aliaire Commission's 1991 report, with its demands for exclusive Quebec jurisdiction in twenty-two different areas, had shocked many English Canadians, the fact is that well over half of those powers were already exercised by Quebec. A number of them, in such areas as education, urban affairs, welfare, etc., were already under provincial jurisdiction, as was the use of civil law in Quebec, and worked very well as a practical administrative arrangement. Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa of the Liberal party had accepted the Charlottetown accord and campaigned in favor of it since the alternative would have been a Quebec referendum on sovereignty. While the rejection of political elites was a major factor in English Canada (much of the discussion there concerned the defense of rights), for Quebec the referendum was about the distribution of power. The questions at issue in various parts of the country were not really the same.