MacDougall: New nation-building acts must happen in the national capital

Ottawa Citizen

29-05-2025

Watching the King of Canada hold court at the temporary home of the Senate this week felt like history being made. And like history coming back to life.
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Yes, the scenes of King Charles and Queen Camilla harkened back to previous visits by other royals, most notably the late Queen Elizabeth when she opened Parliament in 1977. But the history it evoked in me wasn't regal; it was of events a few years later in the same setting — namely, Pierre Trudeau's negotiations over the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, which took place in the same building when it served as the Government Conference Centre.
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The world, the King read in the throne speech, is now a 'more dangerous and uncertain place,' a coded message meant for Donald Trump and his dismantling of world order. But the same could have been said when the elder Trudeau convened the premiers in the wake of the FLQ crisis and the then-robust campaign for Quebec sovereignty. The West was upset, too, with the National Energy Program. Like now, bold action was needed to strengthen national unity and identity.
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Trudeau's answer was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and 'full' Canadian sovereignty. And while the resulting 'Night of the Long Knives' led to René Lévesque's refusal to agree to reform, then to another round of separatism moves (following the failed constitutional wrangling at Meech Lake), the constitutional gambit was a big, bold move when big bold moves were required.
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If Canada is truly experiencing a 'hinge' moment, then big, bold action is required. And that action will need the agreement of the provinces, especially on domestic trade barriers. All the more reason, then, for the new prime minister to pull a 1981 and get the premiers around the table — in Ottawa — to hammer out a deal.
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The location matters. A nation has a national capital for a reason. Big events need to happen on big — and symbolic — stages. Minor players can also come to life, or be exposed, on said stages. If Danielle Smith thinks Alberta separation is a goer, she should meet with all of her colleagues to make the case as part of a broader conversation, as Lévesque did generations ago.
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Our politics and political figures have gotten so small recently, it's hard to remember how enormous some provincial voices of old were. There was Lévesque. But there was also Bill Davis, Peter Lougheed, Bill Bennett and Brian Peckford. Even the ministerial ranks were stuffed with bright minds and big personalities: Jean Chrétien, Roy Romanow and Roy McMurtry. It took the collective action of their minds and the prime minister's to achieve the restructuring of Canada's constitutional order.