MONTREAL

By the time the three-year clock ran out on the Meech Lake constitutional accord on June 23 1990, Parliament Hill was quieter than a funeral parlour.

As is usually the case in late June, the House of Commons stood adjourned for the summer.

Over the last days of the Meech episode, the multi-year campaign to enshrine the deal ratified by 10 premiers and the prime minister at Meech Lake in 1987 in the Constitution had shifted to Manitoba and Newfoundland.

Until the very end, federal strategists hoped against hope and, eventually, against reason that the two hold-out provinces would make the Meech Accord whole by ratifying it.

The entire Liberal clan was gathered in Calgary to choose a successor to John Turner and so was the bulk of the parliamentary press gallery. Delegates and reporters alike were glued to the few available television sets for breaking news from Winnipeg or St. John’s.

Only a skeleton crew of journalists — made up mostly of die-hard constitutional watchers who would go on to spend another half-decade on the unity treadmill covering the rout of the 1992 Charlottetown accord and the sovereignist near-win of the 1995 Quebec referendum — was on hand to hear federal officials pronounce the official death of the accord.

Saint-Jean-Baptiste day was two days later and Mulroney was scheduled to celebrate Quebec’s Fête nationale in his riding. On June 24th 1990, a very quiet group of advisers and journalists boarded a small plane for the tiny Charlevoix locality of Rivière-St-François.

There, Mulroney swore that Canada would remain united. He vouched his government would pursue efforts to formally bring Quebec into the constitutional fold and continue to treat the province as a distinct society. Then he joined a group of musicians for a sing-along and on that surrealistic note, the small crowd quietly broke up.

On the news that night, Mulroney was upstaged by images of the hundreds of thousands of Quebecers who had turned downtown Montreal into a sea of fleurdelysés flags earlier in the afternoon.

It would not be the last time he was upstaged.

On the day 20 years ago when Meech foundered, Mulroney was at the peak of his power. At the half-way point of a second majority mandate, he had beaten long odds by successfully crafting a historic free trade agreement with the United States.

But on June 23, 1990, his luck ran out and his performance the next day, in Rivière-St-François, was his swan song.

After the Meech finale, the federal future turned out to belong to other players.

Jean Chrétien, who had been greatly helped in his quest for the Liberal leadership by the anti-Meech wave, was one of them. He would go on to win the next three elections.

Lucien Bouchard left Mulroney’s cabinet over the handling of the Meech file a month before the accord’s ultimate demise. Over the following five years, he would create the Bloc Québécois; lead it to official opposition status in the Commons and, in the process, alter the fundamental dynamics of federal politics in a lasting way.

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The Meech debate also paved the way for an unlikely Alberta policy wonk called Stephen Harper to go from founding member of a right-wing regional party — borne out of the backlash over Mulroney’s approach to Quebec — to Canada’s 22nd prime minister.

As constitutional overhauls go, the Meech Lake Accord was a modest effort of ultimately limited scope. In hindsight, its demise has brought about a more unpredictable transformation of the Canadian political landscape than its adoption would have had. Twenty years after the fact, that transformation is still ongoing.

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