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The details of the compromise haven’t aged especially well, however, not least from a Trudeauvian perspective. Manitoba Catholics, which in practice is to say francophones, still lost their schools. Francophones were treated the same as any other linguistic minority. If there were enough of them in a given school district, they were entitled to instruction in that language; if not, they were merde out of luck.

From the perspective of Laurier’s detractors, the government had an opportunity to insist upon minority rights and passed it up in hopes of not making a fuss — which is to say, in hopes of winning an election. Laurier needed both Ontario Protestants and Quebec Catholics onside, heading into the 1896 campaign.

Sunny ways can produce collateral damage: Trudeau could ask his friends at Queen’s Park about the law-abiding residents of Caledonia, Ont., sold down the river to appease native protesters

“The ‘sunny way’ was tantamount to a lie,” John Pepall argued in 2004 in The Canadian Review of Books. “Laurier sold out Manitoba’s Catholics for power. In doing so he did not bridge the sectarian divide that was at the root of the Manitoba Schools Question. He levered it.”

I take no side in that debate. It just shows that one man’s sunny way is another man’s thunderhead. And it shows that sunny ways can produce collateral damage: Trudeau could ask his friends at Queen’s Park about the law-abiding residents of Caledonia, Ont., sold down the river to appease native protesters; or about Ontario’s exclusive funding for Catholic schools. Compromise is no substitute for courage, principle and persuasion when it’s needed. And Trudeau is going to need plenty of all three to implement his very ambitious and in many respects commendable agenda.