Trudeau and the End of a Canadian Dream

Raymond B. Blake is director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount
Allison University and the author of Canadians at Last: Canada
Integrates Newfoundland as a Province.

This book argues that the concept of Canada as a union between two
nations—Quebec and English Canada—was destroyed by the
constitutional reform of 1982 and the failure of the Meech Lake Accord
in 1990. In the author’s view, Pierre Elliott Trudeau played a pivotal
role in both events and must shoulder the blame for the end of
Canada’s dualistic dream. This book labors to show that Trudeau’s
desire to create a bilingual and multicultural nation-state ignored the
desires of Quebec for a distinct national society and an autonomous
political community. Laforest’s own simplistic prescriptions for
solving Canada’s constitutional ills—which include recognition of
Quebec as an autonomous political entity equal in every way to the rest
of Canada—are based on the patently false assumption that Canada
outside of Quebec, aside from the First Nations, is a monolithic entity.