A Question of Clarity

In part three of The Champions, Pierre Trudeau's temporary retirement from, and sudden return to, politics quickly gives way to discussion regarding the question that would be asked during the 1980 referendum.

In the end, the question that emerged was not one explicitly about separation, but rather one that asked for a mandate to negotiate sovereignty accompanied by political and economic "association" with the rest of Canada. What emerged was not a notion of sovereignty, but rather the nebulous term of "sovereignty association".

Moreoever, the 1980 referendum promised a second one to ratify whatever agreement Rene Levesque's government could reach with the rest of Canada.

The necessity of such a referendum at all was questioned by many, and with good reason. Quebec's government already had the authority to negotiate nearly anything that it liked with the federal goernment, and with Canada's other provinces.

Pierre Trudeau, who had previously declared Quebec separatism to be dead, didn't intervene until late into the referendum campaign, when it became apparent that Quebec Liberal leader Claude Ryan proved incapable of leading the fight.

Ryan's rejection of political polling was particularly troubling, and led to future Prime Minister Jean Chretien -- who had experience in both federal and provincial politics -- was dispatched to attempt to save the day.

But the absense of Trudeau and his government from the matter of the referendum question was as much a tactical error as entrusting the campaign to Ryan, or Chretien's decision to stay out of the 1995 referendum campaign until late in the contest.

Allowing the referendum question to be decided largely without input from the federal government produced two very problematic questions, one that left many Quebeckers unsure of what they were voting on, and many more deceived.

Eventually, Stephane Dion, under Chretien's leadership, produced the Clarity Act in 1999 -- four years after an ambigious question nearly dismembered Canada during the 1995 referendum, and nearly twenty years after the government should have been involved in the first place.

Moreoever, even in passing the Clarity Act, the Liberals were too late even to that topic. The central ideas of the Clarity Act were effectively lifted out of a previous bill, defeated by the Liberals, introduced by then-Reform Party MP and now Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

While the Liberal Party has long awarded themselves credit for the defeat of the two referendums, they have long evaded the blame for how their complacency on the matter nearly destroyed Canada.

The clarity question could have decided the question of Quebec separatism long before it grew into a decisive theat to Canada.

Reconquete La Conquete

Part two of The Champions deals with the famed 1970 October Crisis, and how the actions of the FLQ challenged both Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque on deep politically existential levels.

For Levesque, he had to confront the reality that individuals willing to engage in terrorism existed within the Quebec separatist movement he had built. (They may exist within that movement still.)

For Trudeau, his invokation of the war measures act challenged the values his party allegedly stood for. In the eyes of some, invoking the war measures act was the right move. After all, Canada was facing a terrorist threat, and the government had to do what was necessary to deal with it. In the eyes of others, invoking the war measures act was an unacceptable contravention of civil liberties.

Domestic terrorism poses a deep challenge to any country that must deal with it. The prospect of citizens who don't respect the rule of law in their political maneuvers is deeply troubling not only to those associating with those individuals -- even if unwillingly, as Levesque was -- and to those who have to deal with them.

One can sense how deeply shaken Levesque was when dealing with the prospect of such terrorists within his movement. One can even sense a slight discomfort for Pierre Trudeau as he dismisses the "bleeding hearts" who worry about the prospects of soldiers with guns in Quebec's cities (a deployment approved not by Stephen Harper, but by Pierre Trudeau).

No citizen wants to believe that they should fear their fellow citizens. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why so many countries avoid dealing with domestic terrorist groups. While it struggles to gain any semblence of credibility, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Guard continue t exist in Canada.

While the FLQ doesn't share a common place in the Canadian imagination as the KKK and the Aryan Guard, these organizations have far more in common than they are usually given credit for.

While Canadian law can often be quite eager to designate foreign groups as a terrorist group, that designation is used all too sparingly against domestic groups.

This could be said to at least partially explain how the FLQ was able to survive even after it had committed its earlier criminal acts.

It wasn't until Pierre LaPorte was murdered, and James Cross was kidnapped, that the Canadian government began to really take the FLQ's bid to "reconquer the conquest" as seriously as the threat it posed merited.

Trudeau, Levesque, and the Spectre of Fascism

The Champions presets the story of Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque, and of the paths that led them to their epic historical confrontation over the future of Quebec within Canada.

While Trudeau's and Levesque's paths periodically diverged and converged, each man had a common ideological denominator: early bruahes with European fascism.

As Max and Monique Nemni note in Young Trudeau, Trudeau wasn't always a federalist. In fact, he grew up admiring fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini and Phillipe Petain. His admiration for fascism was more than merely a passing appreciation of the uniforms, as The Champions seems to suggest.

According to the Nemnis, as a youth Trudeau favoured the creation of Quebec as a decentralized corporatist French-language Roman Catholic state. He even imagined himself returning to Quebec to lead a revolution in its favour.

A great many of the Canadians who have subscribed to the Trudeau political mythology can be quite resentful of this inconvenient truth -- that Canada's prototypical liberal would ever entertain fascist ideas. (One can expect that resentment to be particularly pronounced in certain individuals who loathe Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, despite not actually understanding it.)

But, as the film points out, Trudeau's flirtation with fascist ideas may have been the fancies of a youth who did not fully understand those ideas. As The Champions points out, his experiences in wartime Europe turned him off from the ideas of nationalism and corporatism -- ideas that had so captivated him in his youth.

Rene Levesque had his own run-in with European fascism. When Mussolini was hung in Milan, Levesque witnessed the dying gasps of Italian fascism.

It's on this note that it should be unsurprising that Trudeau and Levesque were brought together in the struggle against Maurice Duplessis' Union Nationale government -- the closest thing to fascism Canada has ever seen.

Trudeau and Levesque took differing paths in their struggle against Duplessis' government. They both started off using their legal skills in support of labour activism. Following that, Trudeau helped found Cite Libre and Levesque joined the Quebec Liberal Party.

Just as their methods of fighting Duplessis' government diverged, so did their views on Quebec's role within Canada. While Trudeau -- who had since run for and won election to the House of Commons -- chose the path of federalism, Levesque chose the path of separatism and nationalism.

Levesque's decision helped give birth to the modern form of Quebec separatism which has traversed a very thin line between democratic legitimacy and nationalist fascism.

Marilyn Waring's Shadow Economics

Marilyn Waring is a former New Zealand MP who is a known advocate for "female human rights".

Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics is a film that outlines Waring's views on economics, outlining what could be considered an early version of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine.

In fact, Waring's description of disaster economics sound a great deal like Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg (Gary Oldman) from the Fifth Element.

In the film, Zorg -- a weapons dealer -- insists that his business actually facilitates the creation of life. He notes that when something is destroyed, it creates work for thousands of people, and creates a use for millions of dollars in capital.

How he imagines he would profit from the destruction of planet Earth by the Shadow entity.

Early in Who's Counting, Waring notes that the economic consequences of many disasters -- such as the wreck of the Exxon Valdez -- are generally assessed by how much productivity they produce. Certainly, the environmental consequences are considered separately, but they aren't tabulated against the Gross Domestic Product of the country in which such disasters occur.

Moreover, it's ideas like this that lend themselves to considering those responsible for operating nuclear aresenals -- perhaps as close as the world today offers to the Fifth Element's Shadow entity -- as economically active.

If GDP alone is used to decide what the economic value of a particular country is, externalities such as those imposed by the Valdez disaster, simply do not count economically.

It's ideas such as this that lend themselves so effectively to Klein's shock doctrine -- the argument that free-market capitalists have helped provoke disasters so that they may benefit from the results, both in terms of profit-making opportunities, and in terms of political influence.

Klein argues that because the externalities of such acts -- environmental, human, and social costs -- aren't counted against GDP, those who provoke such crises (or simply take advantage of them) can often argue that their policies have been an overwhelming success.

(On some occasions, they very clearly have not been able to make such claims.)

Waring argues that the prime currency of economics shouldn't be dollars, yen, or pounds sterling, but rather time. Her argument doesn't really answer the question of how, precisely, one could assign value to time.

But, then again, this is a hurdle that such an argument may not even necessarily need to answer. After all, economics doesn't necessarily give objective value to anything. Instead, the value of goods, services, and even time is judged by the value it can attract in the open market.

In other words, value is determined by whatever the market is willing to pay -- which, in and of itself, is a subjective value statement.

In that particular sense, the economic value of the Exxon Valdez (unless one considers the environmental and human costs of the disaster) was determined according to what those involved were willing to pay to clean it up. Likewise, the economic value of the recent earthquake in Haiti is determined by how much the rest of the world is willing to spend to repair the damage.

When the damage that would result from such events is total (as with the arrival of the Shadow entity, or global nuclear war), one should certainly reconsider the assessed economic value of such activities.

Economics seems to have yet to do this.

This certainly makes economics a cold and hard social science. Whether Waring's conception of using time as a currency would make a difference is difficult to determine. (After all, they say time is money.)