I’m going to let my good friend, the CEO of the Canadian American Business Council, Scotty Greenwood, who was there that historic day, describe the moment. Over to you, Scotty!

By Scotty Greenwood

Bill Clinton was relaxed. So relaxed, in fact, that as his armoured Cadillac Fleetwood glided toward a conference centre in Mont Tremblant, presidential pennants fluttering on its polished black flanks, he nodded off into a nap.

Sitting across from Clinton in the limousine, the US ambassador to Canada fought down impatience and perhaps a touch of anxiety. Gordon Giffin needed to brief the President on the importance and delicate nature of the speech he would be giving upon arrival at the Forum of Federations conference. It was October 8, 1999, and the day would prove momentous.

Thing is, you don’t just wake up a president who needs a rest. And Clinton had been busy.

There’d been the official dedication of the new U.S. embassy on Sussex Drive, the only new American embassy in the world at the time. The dedication had taken place before a large crowd in Major’s Hill Park.

There’d also been a bilateral meeting on Parliament Hill, and of course a series of preplanned pull-asides. The competition for the attention, however brief, of a visiting president is a ferocious thing.

And now here was the man himself, snoozing in the limo as Giffin clutched a briefing binder containing a speech on the most delicate of diplomatic issues: the continued existence of Quebec within the Canadian federation.

The speech was not an American initiative; far from it. It had been a repeated and increasingly pointed request from Clinton’s friend, Prime Minister Jean Chretien. Canada had come close to breaking up in 1995, when Quebeckers rejected “sovereignty association,” as secessionists liked calling their cause, by a single percentage point, after a bitterly contested referendum.

Some Canadians believed Chretien’s breezy complacency about Quebec nationalism had nearly lost the nation, and Chretien was determined to lay down powerful public markers about national unity before leaving office.

He had already referred the question of secession to the Supreme Court of Canada, which responded by ruling that Quebec could not unilaterally secede from Canada, but that if Quebeckers voted to do so, the federal government would have a legal obligation to open negotiations on separation. Quebec separatists were apparently pleased with that squaring of the circle.

They would not be at all pleased by Prime Minister Chretien’s Clarity Act, which was about to be introduced to the House of Commons. It stipulated a series of conditions for any future referendum – conditions so binding that they effectively mooted any plans for a repeat of the 1995 vote.

The Mont Tremblant conference was part of a concerted effort to build political capital for the new legislation, and for Chretien’s national unity push in general. And, the PM wanted Clinton’s support.

The State Department’s view was what you’d expect: Don’t go near this with a barge pole. Why wade into an internal Canadian matter? If the situation were reversed, would Americans welcome a Canadian leader’s intervention? Why risk alienating a Canadian province (which itself is a major U.S. trading partner) with hypothetical talk about whether NAFTA would continue to apply to a sovereign Quebec?

Better, the professional diplomats advised, to keep mouthing the standard lines about the U.S. desiring a good relationship with Quebec inside a strong and united Canada.

But Chretien wanted Clinton onside, and had explicitly asked Giffin to deliver the president on October 8.

So Giffin had put together a pitch: Come to Canada for a round of golf with Chretien, dedicate the new embassy, and speak at the conference as a favour to your friend the Canadian prime minister.

It worked. The President agreed. We conveyed his acceptance, and a hefty deposit was made in the Ottawa favour bank.

That, it turned out, was the easy part. Once the president said yes, Washington’s full foreign policy machinery turned to crafting the speech. Each word was considered. It seemed as though Giffin had to contend with every wonk and speechwriter in the White House, Commerce Department, Defense Department, and of course, State Department.

To be honest, the caution was warranted. We could not afford to have the precious, vaunted U.S.-Canada relationship go sideways because someone misinterpreted a single word or phrase uttered by Bill Clinton. There was zero margin for error as far as Giffin was concerned, and properly so.

In any case, a thoroughly, painstakingly, exhaustively vetted speech had finally made its way into the briefing binder Giffin carried.

With his official duties discharged in Ottawa, the president and his ambassador had returned to Ottawa airport, boarded Marine One, the presidential helicopter, flown to the famed Quebec ski resort, and the speech was at hand. Clinton, as mentioned, was relaxed. He seemed to be more focused on his upcoming golf game than a speech that would be examined and dissected by historians for years to come.

As the motorcade pulled up to the venue, Clinton opened his eyes and grabbed the binder. Giffin explained the scripted and negotiated plan: the president would walk in, and, as protocol dictated, greet Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard (secessionists had been invited to the conference, and, encouraged by the Supreme Court ruling, had agreed to attend). The only caveat, an ask from Chretien’s chief of staff, was that the handshake with Bouchard take place in the green room, out of sight of cameras.

Anyway, Clinton opened the binder, tore out the first couple of pages, which contained a list of acknowledgements of VIPs present, and handed it back, murmuring something to Giffin like: “Don’t worry, Gordon. I’ve got this.”

And off he strode, leaving Giffin holding a speech that had cost Washington thousands of person-hours and protracted agonization to create.

What happened next, at the lectern, was pure Bill Clinton. He was among the extremely few world leaders talented enough to toss away notes and ignore teleprompters. And that is what he did.

He held forth on the fundamental strengths of federalism and community. He warned about the inherent risks of tribalism. He spoke about the aftermath of the First World War, about the sometimes violent endings of empires – British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman. He contrasted Canada’s internal tensions with the situation at the time in East Timor. He made the case for mutual understanding.

“We all have to grow and learn when we confront people who are different than we are, and instead of looking at them in … hatred and dehumanization, we look at them and see a mirror of ourselves and our common humanity.

“What is most likely to advance our common humanity in a smaller world?  What is the arrangement of government most likely to give us … the integrity we need, the self-government we need, the self-advancement we need, without pretending that we can cut all the cords that bind us to the rest of humanity?  I think more and more people will say, ‘This federalism, it’s not such a bad idea.’ ”

Most importantly to Chretien, though, Clinton said something that laid to rest any doubts about the American position on Quebec secession.

With Lucien Bouchard in the front row, he warned that "when a people thinks it should be independent in order to have a meaningful political existence, serious questions should be asked.... Are minority rights as well as majority rights respected? How are we going to co-operate with our neighbours?"

Bouchard was not pleased. But in a stroke, the American position had been dramatically updated. The U.S. president had delivered a warning. The Clarity Act would pass into law. And the rest, as they say … well, you know.caption id="attachment_1157256" align="alignnone" width="700" CABC event, 2017, Palais de congress, Montréal/caption

Maryscott (Scotty) Greenwood is an American specialist in Canada/U.S. relations. A former political appointee in the Clinton Administration, she now serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian-American Business Council. Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.