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There are millions of Canadians who have no memory of the day the Meech Lake accord crashed and burned, 25 years ago this week.

Much has changed in the interim. Governments have risen and fallen. Whole parties have come into being, flared and faded. Yet the one thing that has not changed is the invincible certainty of its proponents that they were right, and that the public, which rejected it massively, was wrong. Canada: a country too good for its people.

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For a group so convinced of their own rightness, the Meech set seem unusually susceptible to falsehoods. The whole rationale for the accord was and is steeped in myth, and myth upon myth: that Quebec was left out of the negotiations on the 1982 Constitution; that its powers were reduced; that its consent was not given; that consequently, without its “signature,” it has somehow been excluded from the Constitution all these years.

These have been repeated so often that people who weren’t around at the time may believe them to be true, or at least true enough. But they aren’t. Quebec was not left out of the negotiations: its separatist premier, Rene Levesque, broke with his erstwhile colleagues in the “Gang of Eight,” who, seeing their common front breached and fearing the referendum on patriation to which he had foolishly agreed, chose the moment to close the deal with the feds.