Pulling the Thread That Unravels the Tapestry
Like many interesting stories, this begins with a mistake and a clerical error.
My colleague David Brock and I wrote an article for the Saskatchewan Law Review called “Beyond the Writ: The Expansion and Ambiguity of the Caretaker Convention in the 21st Century,” which came out in May 2024. We only mentioned the Trudeau-Turner Trade Off or the Patronage Controversy of 1984 in passing under a brief summary of how politicians, civil servants, and scholars understood the caretaker convention in the 20th century. We noted that Trudeau persuaded Turner to sign a letter in which the he promised Trudeau to undertake the remainder of Trudeau’s patronage appointments after becoming prime minister but before advising the Governor General to dissolve parliament for a general election. In my research notes, I had cited an article from Maclean’s magazine attesting to the existence of those letters and the political arrangement. But for whatever reason, I had written the wrong article in the note. The editors of the Saskatchewan Law Review caught and pointed out this mistake in January 2024. I was perplexed, because I knew that I had read some article in Maclean’s which mentioned the deal, and I’m not in the habit of making things up. I wanted the final manuscript to keep this sentence intact, so I become determined to solve this Mystery of the Mistaken Footnote. I re-subscribed to Maclean’s to gain access to the archives and retrace my steps. After several hours of pouring through the weekly issues from April to July 1984, I finally found the article from which I derived my claim and sent it off to the editors. This evidence confirmed that Maclean’s had reported on the Trudeau-Turner Trade Off and saved our passing reference to this little-known precedent in the final, published article.
But in the course of reading through Maclean’s coverage of the Liberal leadership election, the transfer of power between Trudeau and Turner, and the start of the election in 1984, I realised that my original recognition that the two prime ministers had struck up a deal hid a much larger and more fascinating story – which I would never have uncovered at all and of which I would almost certainly remain ignorant today if I had not made this mistake. I pulled on a thread that unravelled a tapestry of a fascinating precedent in Canadian political history which seemed known at the time but which the ensuing decades turned into a faded memory. Today, even Canadian politicos only remember or are aware of the fallout of this corrupt bargain but not the origins of the scandal itself. All this provided Brian Mulroney the chance to utter the most famous retort in Canadian politics in the television age: “You had an option, sir.” But I now understand why John Turner kept insisting during the leaders’ debate – and, more importantly, sincerely believed – that he “had no option.”
The Trudeau-Turner Trade Off of 1984 deserves more recognition as an important precedent, and not so much in the annals of the caretaker convention in Canada, as I had previously understood it (though it remains partly about that), but more in terms of how Governors General appoint Prime Ministers and how the civil service organises transfers of power between ministries. The Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law will publish my full article on the subject in early 2025. For now, I would like to share some highlights and a series of archival political videos which make this whole thing more fun.
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