Gilbert Lavoie’s week-long series of excerpts from his twilight interviews with Jean Pelletier continue to provide fascinating headlines in Le Soleil. The former Quebec City mayor and Jean Chrétien chief of staff always loved to talk, it’s just that during most of his years in Ottawa he was selective about who he’d talk to. So there’s an element of surprise in much of what he told Lavoie. Not that what Pelletier says should be taken as gospel, and indeed just about the only thing missing from Lavoie’s yeoman work is some attempt to put Pelletier’s assertions into context and to test them against the recollections of contemporaries. Still, fun. Highlights:
Gilbert Lavoie’s week-long series of excerpts from his twilight interviews with Jean Pelletier continue to provide fascinating headlines in Le Soleil. The former Quebec City mayor and Jean Chrétien chief of staff always loved to talk, it’s just that during most of his years in Ottawa he was selective about who he’d talk to. So there’s an element of surprise in much of what he told Lavoie. Not that what Pelletier says should be taken as gospel, and indeed just about the only thing missing from Lavoie’s yeoman work is some attempt to put Pelletier’s assertions into context and to test them against the recollections of contemporaries. Still, fun. Highlights:
• Pelletier says Chrétien was a year away from developing a high-speed rail line between Quebec City and Toronto that would have been financed through the sale of Petro-Can shares. But the whole thing was sidelined by Paul Martin, “who was always a bus guy.”
• Pelletier calls Martin a nasty word for firing Pelletier from Via during the sponsorship unpleasantness.
• Pelletier says he supported the Meech Lake accord (he didn’t start working for Chrétien until after its collapse) and he wrote Chrétien a long personal letter explaining his disappointment with the death of Meech. Chrétien read it and discussed it with Pelletier, but it “didn’t change his mind.”
And now there’s more. In today’s installment, Pelletier repeats a claim the Chrétien camp has been making lately: that the Clarity Act was Chrétien’s idea, not Stéphane Dion, and that in fact Dion resisted the idea at first before rallying like, in Pelletier’s words, “a good soldier.” Perhaps even more interesting, Pelletier says he and Dion travelled to Quebec City twice in 1999 to try to persuade Jean Charest to “lead the charge” on Clarity — a passage that demands further explanation, because the Clarity Act as written bound the federal government, not Quebec’s National Assembly, so it’s unclear what Charest’s role would have been. But all of this makes it worthwhile, perhaps, to dig out some personal memories to put the events of the late 1990s into some perspective.
Anyway, all of this is moot. The Quebec secession debate lies dormant, for now. If it thaws, it will be under different actors and in different circumstances. Pelletier’s interview serves as a reminder that nothing definitive about 1995 has yet been written on the federalist side.