Of all the incredible stories that occurred during the 1995 referendum campaign, one of my favorites concerns Lucienne Robillard. A former Liberal minister in Quebec, she had just entered the federal cabinet at the start of 1995 and was given Canadian responsibility for the referendum dossier. It was a big mistake to cast, for two reasons. First, because unlike her boss Jean Chrétien, she fervently wanted Quebec to obtain more powers in the federation. Then, because she honestly believed in democracy.
On the day of the referendum, and when the results are expected to be tight, she waits for the signal to go to the No rally, at the Metropolis, where she is to speak. According to the story she told the late Jean Lapierre and Chantal Hébert for their excellent work Post-referendum confessions (Éditions de l’Homme), his bodyguards lied to him. “It seems that there was only one door they could let me in and that in the streets there would have been too much mayhem. That’s what they tell me. The speeches begin on television. This is where I realize that [Daniel] Johnson and [Jean] Charest are there and I’m not. I was furious. She was at the Sheraton, two kilometers away.
Why did Jean Chrétien’s team want to prevent him from speaking on this historic evening? Because she had made several inexcusable blunders. She had opposed the organization of the great demonstration of No, known as the ” love in », Held three days before the vote. “It was very risky and we made a commitment to respect the law concerning referendum expenses in Quebec. We have never known the total amount of the sums spent on this operation, which must be added to the half-million noted by Judge Grenier in the partially secret report which the National Assembly demanded publication this week. But their illegality was patent. “I was pretty pissed off about it,” says Robillard.
Next, she considered the openness shown at the end of the campaign by Chrétien, who promised to recognize that Quebec formed a distinct society, to be much too timid. “Well, what? So what ? did she say. What else ? It was the find of the century! I was a little desperate. »
Above all, she had had the imprudence to affirm, a few weeks before the referendum, that “no matter the result, we were going to respect the will of Quebecers”. Which earned him a summons to the PM’s office. “That’s when I understood, without being told, that it meant that if the Yes won by 52%, 53%, we would not accept it. »
The rectitude of Lucienne Robillard illuminates, by contrast, the lack of scruples that reigned in her boss Jean Chrétien and around him. The decision to trample on democratic legality in the search for victory was fully assumed. “When we’re at war, are we going to lose the country because of a comma in the law?” candidly summed up the right arm of Chrétien Jean Pelletier, in an interview with the Sun, adding for greater clarity: “In war, you don’t ask if ammunition is paid for, you shoot it. »
Nor do we ask if they are true, the ammunition. In the week preceding the referendum, Chrétien and his entourage awakened to the possibility of a narrow Yes victory. The Prime Minister decides to speak loudly to bring the undecided back to the status quo camp. How to go about it ?
In The Way It Works, his memoirs published in 2006, Chrétien’s adviser Eddie Goldenberg reveals the tenor of the debate on the advisability of lying to Quebecers. If Chrétien, Goldenberg recounts, “said bluntly that a Yes vote meant the breakup of Canada, how could he claim the following week that the referendum was illegitimate because the question was unclear? On the other hand, if he did not say that a vote for Yes meant the break-up of the country, then the forces of Yes had a much better chance of winning”.
This dilemma exists because the Prime Minister has already decided that he will not recognize a Yes victory. He said it in private to several relatives, he will confirm it the day after the vote. Chretien decided as follows, according to Goldenberg: “Let’s do everything we can to win this week. If we lose anyway, that will not prevent me from saying that the question was too ambiguous to be taken as a mandate to separate. What Chrétien confirms almost word for word in his own book political passionpublished in 2007 (Boréal).
“To remain Canadian or not to be so, to stay or to leave, that is what is at stake in the referendum”, he solemnly declares on all the screens of the country. Then, he specifies to whom this decision belongs. In the House of Commons? To the articles of the Constitution? No: “From one end of Canada to the other, people know that this decision is in the hands of their fellow citizens of Quebec. Finally, and even more fundamentally, he describes what will happen if the Yes vote wins: Quebec independence is a “serious and irreversible decision.” Irreversible.
In his memoirs, Chrétien credits this scam with having “turned the tide and given victory to the No”. To follow him in this reasoning is to admit that the survival of Canada rests on a lie.
We therefore understand that in the event of a narrow victory for Yes, it was absolutely necessary to prevent someone from spoiling the sauce by accepting the result. Robillard, write Lapierre and Hébert, was “a ticking time bomb for his own government.” Because on the night of the referendum, “if the Prime Minister’s own referendum emissary overtook him and legitimized the sovereignty victory, the situation would have become downright untenable for the Ottawa Liberals”. Hence the absolute necessity of silencing this deviant, this anomaly, this democrat.
Father, columnist and author, Jean-François Lisée led the PQ from 2016 to 2018. | [email protected] ; blog: jflisee.org