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...lines, divisions within the labour movement have closely reflected the common regional and linguistic cleavages in Canadian society more generally. However, in the same way that constitutional questions have helped shape the character of organized labour in Canada, the labour movements of both Quebec and English Canada have attempted to reciprocally influence the character of constitutional questions in an effort to improve the economic clout and political power Of trade unions. By adopting competing political perspectives concerning the powerful centripetal and centrifugal economic forces that characterize the changing nature of federal-provincial relations, the labour movement in Quebec and the labour movement in English Canada have attempted to influence constitutional politics in contradictory ways; the latter by attempting to strengthen the role of the federal government at the expense of the provinces, and the former by attempting to strengthen the power of Quebec City vis-a-vis Ottawa.
This article is concerned with organized labour's response to Canadian constitutional politics during Brian Mulroney's tenure as prime minister (1984-1993). Specifically, the article argues that the political cleavages surrounding failed attempts at constitutional reform under Mulroney were reflected in the internal politics of the labour movement, eventually leading to the creation of a "sovereignty-association" partnership agreement between the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Quebec Federation of Labour (FTQ).
Despite the establishment of the CLC in 1956, it is impossible to speak of a pan-Canadian labour movement. Canada's regional character and linguistic duality have created one of the most substantial divisions within the labour movement. Indeed Canada is home to two distinct labour movements: one in English Canada and one in Quebec. The vast majority of unions outside of Quebec are affiliated to the CLC. However, Quebec unions have gravitated in different directions, affiliating themselves to a host of independent unions and a number of different labour centrals including the CLC-affiliated FTQ, the Confederation des syndicats nationaux (CSN) and the Centrale des syndicats du Quebec (CSQ). (1)
The de facto existence of two distinct labour movements in Canada has meant that political struggles that have typified national politics are also in evidence in labour politics. The fact that so many political conflicts resolve themselves into constitutional struggles stands as stark testimony to the abiding fractures in the Canadian polity and the Canadian trade union movement provides an example of the pervasiveness of this dynamic and discourse. Thus it was that on 25 November 1993, during a period of intense constitutional turmoil in Canadian politics, the CLC and the FTQ reached a historic agreement that essentially gave the FTQ the status of a proper trade union central in Quebec. The FTQ would no longer be considered a provincial wing of the CLC like the other provincial federations of labour. Instead, the FTQ would be treated as the incarnation of the CLC in Quebec, free to determine its own political priorities and allocate resources accordingly. Due to the sheer amount of power and jurisdictional responsibility transferred from the CLC to the FTQ, officials in both organizations have dubbed the agreement a form of sovereignty-association.
After the CLC and the FTQ negotiated their new partnership agreement in 1993, labour leaders from both Quebec and English Canada showcased their institutional arrangement as a model for Canadian federalism. The FTQ's C1ement Godbout told La Presse that politicians in Quebec and the rest of Canada should use the CLC-FTQ model in the event that Quebec departed confederation. (2) Steelworkers President Leo Gerard told La Presse "Les politiciens du Canada auraient beaucoup a apprendre du mouvement syndical." (3) CUPE President Judy Darcy expressed the following view: "Je suis tres fiere du mouvement ouvrier. Nous venons de montrer que nous sommes capables de faire ce que les politiciens du Canada front pas ete capables de faire ... Si ce pays avait respecte les droits du Quebec comme nous l'avons fait, peut-etre qu'il serait capable de rester ensemble." (4)
On the surface, there are ostensibly two different explanations for the CLC-FTQ sovereignty-association agreement. The first, which has been subtly advanced by Jean Boivin and Esther Deom, is that the CLC's recognition of special status for the FTQ is the product of simple organizational maintenance. (5) A second explanation, which has been trumpeted by the labour movement, is that the agreement is an attempt to accommodate Quebec's cultural and political specificity and, as such, represents a clear political expression of solidarity with the political aspirations of Quebec. This article argues that although the CLC-FTQ partnership agreement was precipitated by a crisis of representation within the CLC's structure, both the FTQ and the Congress negotiated the partnership agreement with a view to transcending their own constitutional impasses, exacerbated by the Meech Lake and Charlottetown rounds of constitutional reform, in a bid to maintain peace in the House of Labour.
This article focuses on peak labour organizations (the CLC and the FTQ) for several reasons. Federalism and contemporary constitutional developments have of course had an effect on a whole range of labour organizations from individual unions to national labour bodies. My decision to concentrate on the CLC and the FTQ, however, is dictated by the specific research objective of this article, which is to describe and explain the relationship between the national constitutional discourse and organized labour's own constitutional perspectives during Brian Mulroney's tenure as prime minister. This requires a focus on the CLC and the FTQ because it has been these two peak organizations that have been most directly involved in espousing organized labour's constitutional views. In the process they have developed a new institutional relationship of their own influenced in no small part by national constitutional discourse. The CLC is one of the two principal actors in this drama by virtue of its position as the official national voice of labour. Because the CLC is responsible for developing a national political agenda for organized labour, regularly submits briefs to parliamentary committees, constantly issues press releases, and is routinely sought out for media representation of labour's views on topical political issues, an accurate account of its position on the evolving Canadian constitutional agenda is critical to the subject of this article. The FTQ figures prominently throughout the article, not only as a partner in the CLC-FTQ relationship, but also as the largest, most diverse, and most representative labour organization in Quebec. (6)
What follows is structured chronologically, beginning with a brief review of the literature followed by a short history of the constitutional question's impact on CLC-FTQ relations. Next, the discussion considers the CLC and FTQ approaches to the Meech Lake Accord, followed by a detailed account of organized labour's approach to dealing with the Charlottetown Accord. In both these sections, the article explores how longstanding party-union relationships complicated the trade union movement's fractured constitutional perspective. Finally, the article concludes with a summary of the findings and reinforces how these failed attempts at constitutional reform provided the necessary political climate for the CLC and FTQ to achieve a sovereignty-association partnership agreement.
Scholars in both Quebec (7) and English Canada (8) have shown keen interest in organized labour's relationship to Quebec's National Question, focusing on the ways in which the labour movement has both shaped and been shaped by Canada's constitutional crisis. In doing so, previous scholarship sets up a framework for understanding how constitutional questions have divided trade unionists in Quebec from their counterparts in English Canada by focusing on the intersection of class and nation. The work of these scholars has helped make familiar the story of the economic disparities between francophone and anglophone workers and the importance of language in defining the nationalist project in Quebec. In a historical context, Quebec's branch plant economy created a situation wherein francophone workers were forced to labour in English for their English Canadian and American employers. In unionized shops, employers expected their francophone workers to negotiate and administer collective agreements in the language of business, which was English. These social realities represent a powerful explanatory factor in the rise of nationalism and separatism within the Quebec labour movement in the 1960s.
The Constitutional Question's Impact on CLC-FTQ Relations
In the case of English Canada, organized labour's preference for comprehensive national standards and central economic planning has always underwritten its centralist view of the state and the federal system. This view is based on the notion that a government requires control over all major economic levers in order to achieve progressive redistributive policies traditionally favoured by the labour movement. Any division of powers that frustrate the federal government's ability to pursue egalitarian policies is generally met with hostility by organized labour outside of Quebec.
To be sure, this view was even shared, to a lesser extent, by labour organizations in Quebec during the Duplessis regime. It was only after the Quiet Revolution that the Quebec labour movement began to diverge significantly from the labour movement in English Canada on questions of federalism and central economic planning. The combination of a progressive nationalist self-realization, and the dominance of Keynesian-inspired economic expansion, facilitated this divergence as francophones carne to see that their provincial state, which had been used to oppress workers for so long, could be used as a progressive tool to advance their interests. Beginning in 1966, the FTQ adopted the Quebec government's constitutional strategy vis-a-vis the federal government by asking the CLC for greater authority and jurisdiction over union affairs in Quebec.
Quebecois scholars have written extensively on the relationship between class and nation in trade union politics. (9) The emergence of the moderately separatist and initially social democratic Parti Quebecois, the October crisis, and the progressively more divisive debates concerning language policy in the 1970s, all increased support for sovereignty among union members in Quebec. (10) Growing nationalist sentiment in Quebec was also reflected in the FTQ's attitude towards the CLC. In a bid to counter the dramatic rise of the CSN at the FTQ's expense, the Federation managed to secure a limited degree of autonomy from the Congress in 1974, thus achieving special status for the FTQ. The CLC, initially reluctant to devolve powers to a provincial federation of labour, was forced to do so as a form of organizational maintenance. (11) The FTQ's new special status, which gave it responsibility for labour councils and labour education, reinforced nationalist sentiment within the organization. Many union leaders in Quebec began to actively support sovereignty, arguing that it would allow the province to control the important economic levers needed to pursue progressive economic policies. (12) More symbolically, they argued that sovereignty would forever put an end to the linguistic division of labour that characterized the province's system of industrial relations. (13) The CLC'S preference for centralization naturally aligned the organization with the federal government, while the FTQ's penchant for decentralization brought the Federation closer to the Quebec government. This divergence was initially detected within the affiliates of both organizations, where unions like the United Autoworkers Union (UAW), Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) amended their structures to accommodate the aspirations of their respective Quebec wings. These unions acted as pioneers and were at the forefront of the struggle to achieve greater autonomy for the FTQ within the CLC. In 1975, the FTQ officially endorsed the separatist PQ, which went on to win a majority government in the 1976 provincial election. The FTQ's strong support for the sovereignist option forced the CLC to recognize Quebec's right to self-determination in its 1978 Statement on National Solidarity. In April 1980, the FTQ called on its members to vote OUI in Quebec's referendum on sovereignty-association. The CSN joined the FTQ in support of a OUI vote, while the CEQ campaigned against federalism without officially taking a position on the referendum question. Despite the support of both the FTQ and the CSN, Quebec sovereignists suffered a crushing defeat in the 1980 referendum, losing 60 percent to 40 percent. In the post 1980 referendum period, the Quebec labour movement did not hesitate to take strong positions on divisive constitutional issues. Organized labour in Quebec actively opposed the patriation of the Constitution while the CLC continued to struggle with developing a concrete constitutional position that enjoyed pan-Canadian labour support from both inside and outside Quebec.
Meech Lake
The federalist victory in the 1980 Quebec referendum and the PQ's shift to the right in the mid 1980s temporarily calmed separatist forces within the Quebec labour movement--sovereignty was viewed as more of an insurance policy than an immediate priority in this period. In the 1984 federal election, Brian Mulroney's Conservatives, who ran on a campaign promise to bring Quebec back into the constitutional fold, took 58 of 75 seats in that province and formed an impressive majority government. The PQ machine, motivated more by a desire to see the federal Liberals go down to defeat, helped put Quebec nationalists running under the Conservative banner over the top in many Quebec ridings. Rene Levesque's "beau risque" strategy of supporting Mulroney's Conservatives in the 1984 federal election in an effort to boost Quebec's constitutional fortunes alienated hard-line sovereignists in the PQ and prompted the resignation of a handful of cabinet ministers. However, the election of Jacques Parizeau as PQ leader in 1988 and the explosive debate over the Meech Lake Accord reinvigorated nationalist sentiment in the PQ and among Quebec's working class. (14)
In early 1987, Mulroney and the ten premiers met at the Prime Minister's cottage on Meech Lake near Gatineau, Quebec to hammer out a set of constitutional amendments that became known as the Meech Lake Accord. The Accord contained five major proposals that Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa insisted be accepted in order to secure his government's support for constitutional reform. It committed to recognizing Quebec as a "distinct society" within Canada; renewed Canada's commitment to official bilingualism; increased provincial authority over immigration; expanded the provincial right to a constitutional veto; and gave provincial governments more input into the process...
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