That’s Brian Peckford’s problem now. The former Newfoundland premier is determined to set the record straight on how the agreement came about in November 1981 to patriate the Constitution. He has written a political memoir that aims to change the story of how the deal went down.
In terms of contemporary history, it’s hard to overstate the importance of that event to Canada today. The fact that the country has a formal made-in-Canada Constitution, with civil rights guaranteed and an amending formula, is profound enough.
But the political and social consequences of those events are still being felt. Quebec’s separatists have dined off the story for years about how their greatest hero, Rene Levesque, was stabbed in the back by the other premiers. The so-called Night of the Long Knives has attained the status of legend among nationalist circles in Quebec.
The amending formula played a big role in the political and national identity crisis stirred up by the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, which were Brian Mulroney’s attempts to fix what went wrong in 1981-1982.
The damage those two events caused to the Progressive Conservative party led first to the creation of the Bloc Québécois in 1990 and eventually to the destruction of the PC party itself and its replacement by the current Conservatives.
The fallout was also devastating to the Liberals. Their fate is still much in doubt.
The story of the deal is a pretty good yarn, with its colourful characters: Levesque, Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien, Roy Romanow, Peter Lougheed, Richard Hatfield and, of course, Peckford himself.
The narrative is satisfying in a very Canadian way. The story goes that Chretien, Romanow and Ontario attorney general Roy McMurtry sketched out the deal on scraps of paper in a kitchen at the Chateau Laurier. So three buddies in a kitchen make a deal that leads to a momentous achievement. Good story.
At the time, Peckford was the brash and rough-edged populist premier of a hard-luck province. He was determined that Newfoundlanders would benefit from what was still just the promise of offshore oil wealth. They loved him for it.
He had jousted with Ottawa over the Labrador power deal with Quebec, and the offshore. He roused popular anger against the feds, stirring up Newfound-landers’ sense of grievance and of nationalism. He fought resource and constitutional battles right to the Supreme Court. It was a turbulent time.
Peckford threw himself into the constitutional talks that began in early 1981. He saw an opportunity to better define provincial powers and enshrine a say for smaller provinces in future amendments. He was a central agitator among the “gang of eight” provinces resisting the centralizing federals.
Peckford, now 69 and living on Vancouver Island, wants to correct the “misrepresentations” of the events of Nov. 4-5, 1981. He argues that the kitchen cabinet story is largely myth and that almost all historical accounts of it represent “an incorrect version of events on how the agreement came together.”
He says he has the documentation to prove that a draft he wrote and presented to the other first ministers evolved into the final document, not the more famous kitchen paper.
But back to his problem, that history thing. Even Peckford admits the kitchen story “has been the accepted version for 30 years,” repeated many times by journalists and historians. He wants to change that.
He has taken his version to conferences, written to journalists and submitted a dissenting note on the Patriation article in the Canadian Encyclopedia. He is a man on a mission.
But history is funny that way. While most people would agree that a true, balanced and unvarnished version of the story is what is demanded by history, the good story part is going to be hard to top.
Original Article
Source: the chronicle herald
Author: DAN LEGER
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