In the wake of the startling 1995 Quebec referendum, Jean Chrétien’s Liberals faced some tough questions. Who devised the strategy that led to such a narrow win? Why was the strength of the sovereigntist movement so badly underrated? But according to York University political scientist Kenneth McRoberts, blame for the federalists’ near-defeat lies with none other than former prime minister Pierre Trudeau.

In Misconceiving Canada, Trudeau is portrayed as a kind of Pied Piper, offering to rid the villagers in Canada-outside-Quebec of the separatist rats, but leaving the poor, bewildered common folk in worse straits than when he started. This analysis is common among francophone Quebeckers and academics outside the province, but it will surprise a wider audience. Trudeau, after all, is widely regarded outside Quebec as having successfully sent the sovereigntists packing, whereas Brian Mulroney’s failed Meech Lake Accord is thought to have reignited separatist passions.

McRoberts disagrees. Until Trudeau came along, he writes, there was a healthy ambiguity about the terms of the Canadian deal. French Quebeckers saw the country as a compact between two equal nations, English and French. Other Canadians may have had other ideas, but they didn’t impose their contradictory visions on the institutions of Canadian government. Then, in the 1960s, two things happened. The Quiet Revolution heightened Quebeckers’ needs for special arrangements, and Pierre Trudeau rose to fight against such arrangements. When he became prime minister, “the struggle to find in Canadian federalism an accommodation of the new Quebec nationalism…had come to a full and irrevocable end.”

Support for separatism, in McRoberts’ view, grew because Quebeckers hated Trudeau’s attempts to squeeze them into the Procrustean bed of one-size-fits- all federalism. Quebeckers felt increasingly cramped by Trudeau’s emphasis on individual rights and provincial equality. Then, when Meech Lake was torpedoed by Trudeau and his heirs because it offended those principles, separatism rose in direct reaction to the advance of the “Trudeau vision.”

This argument was overdue for a serious airing in English, but skeptics will find it unconvincing on a half-dozen fronts. French Quebeckers seem curiously helpless in McRoberts’ view, their reactions portrayed as inevitable in the face of bad choices on the part of English Canadians, who at least have choices. Neither does he demonstrate – he doesn’t even try – that Quebec’s social and economic development has been hampered by post-Trudeau federalism. Nor does he prove that asymmetrical arrangements for Quebec would be acceptable to other Canadians, perhaps because he’s properly leery of sketching those arrangements in any detail.

Quebec nationalism in the 1960s, he writes, “was driven by the project of completing the construction of a modern francophone society in Quebec. Of necessity it called for a change in the status and powers of Quebec.”

Skip forward 30 years to today. Quebec is incontrovertibly “a modern francophone society.” By McRoberts’ own argument, that must mean either that Quebec won the “change in status and powers” that it needed – or that it never needed such a change. Either conclusion is easy to defend; rather more so than McRoberts’ thesis.