When Joe Clark lost the vote of confidence on December 13, 1979, political commentators widely mocked him. Joe, they said, couldn’t count. He should have known that he was leading a minority government and, in spite of his macho boast that he would govern as if he had a majority, he ought to have been more careful in his handling of the House of Commons.

John English, University of Waterloo historian, argues in Just Watch Me, the second volume, that Clark blundered by not cultivating Québec Creditiste leader Fabien Roy and his six votes.

Clark knew perfectly well that he could have bought the Creditistes’ votes with generous government projects for their ridings this time, but they would have had their hands out each time an important vote came up in the House, and the cost to the Canadian taxpayer would have been enormous. He had a better plan. He fully expected that, if an election were held, they would all lose their seats. He turned out to be right, though they lost them to Liberals.

Would the Liberals dare to defeat his government without a leader? Could he ask for anything more than to head into an election against a leaderless opposition party? Even those who had engineered the defeat of the government began to worry when it appeared that support for Trudeau was by no means unanimous and that Trudeau had no intention of returning unless the party begged him.

Eventually it did. Thus began perhaps the most cynical and bizarre election campaign in Canadian history. Trudeau’s handlers knew that that the Liberals were ahead in the polls, that the Canadian voters didn’t much want the Tories back, and therefore if they kept Trudeau largely out of sight, people would forget why they had disliked him less than a year before. It worked, and Trudeau won a majority.

If Trudeau’s first term in office had been largely one of modest achievement, his second term ran at a blistering pace, provoking crises on the economic, constitutional, and diplomatic fronts: the National Energy Policy (NEP), Patriation and the Charter, and the Peace Initiative. The NEP and the Charter were two of the most divisive policies ever introduced into Canadian political life.

The NEP regulated the price of oil in an attempt to protect the competitiveness of central Canada’s (mainly Ontario’s) manufacturing sector. The consequence was an enormous loss of revenue to Alberta that added yet more fuel to the bitter sense of oppression at the hands of Eastern vested interests that had its roots from the time before Alberta became a territory in 1905. I recall being on a talk show on an Edmonton radio station about 2000 and the visceral anger about the NEP was still palpable two decades after its introduction.

Although Trudeau proposed to “patriate” the constitution, he was not initially clear, as English shows in his biography, exactly what he wanted to do. Canada already had John Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights, but this was not legally binding on the federal government and it did not apply to the provinces at all. Patriation, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with a Charter of Rights. It dealt mostly with creating a made-in-Canada formula to amend our constitution. Combining patriation with a Charter of Rights was a political choice, not a legal necessity.

Trudeau was prepared to proceed with his package with minimal support, or none, from the provinces, but the Supreme Court of Canada made it clear that there was a constitutional “convention” that said a change of this magnitude required substantial provincial support. Just as important, it said that Quebec did not have a veto over constitutional change. Rene Levesque, Quebec’s separatist premier, was outraged and felt betrayed.

A Charter of Rights gave Trudeau what he wanted: Victory over the sovereignist vision of Canada. His earlier bilingualism and multiculturalism policies allowed individual Québecers freedom to leave the territorial confines of the province and live wherever they wished in Canada, without losing their francophone identity. A Charter recognized them as individual men and women who took their identity from the same source as all other Canadians, a constitutional document, and who did not look to language, culture, territory, and history to discover who they were. Within the context of the Charter, they too could create themselves free from the dead hand of the past.

The Charter was imposed on Quebec. There can be no question of that. Trudeau bitterly opposed Mulroney’s attempts at reconciliation in Meech Lake and the Charlottetown Accord. He was determined that Quebecers should be citizens of the world.

Trudeau had always been fascinated with foreign affairs, and in October 1983 decided to launch a peace initiative, an attempt to go beyond super power dialogue, to add a “third rail of high-level political energy to speed the course of agreement.” Former girlfriend Barbra Streisand applauded it, and current girlfriend, actress Margot Kidder was a supporter. The world leaders he met for the most part found him a nuisance, or worse.

When Trudeau left office, he was, as he had been for most of his political career, unpopular. The approval ratings stood just over 10%.

Out of office, though, the charm remained. I met him only once with my sons, who were about five and eight. He shook hands and almost immediately squatted down and talked to the children. He related to children and was warm and genuine with them.

In retirement, though, Canadians grew very fond of him. It is hard to know why, given their dislike for most of his policies. Perhaps they concluded that someone who liked children and attractive movie stars couldn’t be all bad.

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