Since before Confederation, Globe editors have fretted over Quebec’s place in Canada more than most other issues. But facing the French fact took hard work – and that work continues
The short, unhappy life of the Meech Lake Accord ended on June 23, 1990, sparking an intractable question that gnaws at us still: Who killed Meech?
11th-hour talks to save Meech, rather than meeting with them weeks earlier. His comments suggested he had made a conscious decision to gamble with the country’s future. On seeing the story, Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells was furious: “It gives the impression we’re being manipulated.” For the next century, Globe editors remained sensitive to Quebec’s “peculiar interests,” with notable exceptions. The paper’s Loyalist bent asserted itself during two world wars, as it backed conscription in 1917 and 1942 over fierce opposition in Quebec. And The Globe saw Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, who ruled the province through a mixture of fear and coercion, as such a scourge that it became the first non-Quebec newspaper to open a Quebec City bureau in 1954.
The Globe editorial page provided a mixed assessment: “What was accomplished was considerable. At least we finally moved as a federal state. Some of us argued that we had laboured and produced a typical Canadian compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It was an angry settlement, arrived at in the worst way to effect abiding change. It involved methods that, if indulged in often, would leave us in danger of ceasing to be a country.
Bourassa decided to hold a referendum on this modified version of Meech, which included additional guarantees of self-government for Indigenous Canadians and the promise of a Triple-E Senate. Mulroney opted for a referendum in the rest of Canada. Jean Chrétien had refused to make concessions to Quebec. Only days before the vote, with the No side faltering, the prime minister relented in a televised address to the country: “We must recognize that Quebec’s language, its culture and institutions make it a distinct society. And no constitutional change that affects the powers of Quebec should ever be made without the consent of Quebeckers.”The referendum results rattled Canada to its core.
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