Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau offered no false optimism in talks with the senior U.S. official in Canada after the surprise election of Rene Lévesque and the PQ three days before. Ambassador Thomas Enders had a 40-minute private meeting with Trudeau in the aftermath of the PQ win and filed a report on his discussion to the State Department on November 18, 1976.It makes for grim reading, even today, decades later.“Trudeau displayed no optimism: he made no effort (as have others) to describe for me a scenario in which everything comes out all right,” Ambassador Enders wrote. “While there are ‘some fools on their side too,’ he described Levesque as a ‘formidable, totally committed adversary.’”Prime Minister Trudeau’s position in facing off against the separatists was weak, Enders surmised.“It is not at all clear that Trudeau has the strength to stonewall Levesque the way he stonewalled Bourassa,” Enders wrote. “The opposition Progressive Conservatives and rival John Turner within the Liberal Party may both advocate …. concessions, as will some of the western provinces to keep Quebec in Federation. We can expect a debate within the government on centralism vs a looser confederation. If Trudeau does stick to his present course of no concessions, the Ottawa/Quebec clash may escalate quite quickly.”You can read Enders’ entire report about his confidential 40-minute discussion with Canada’s 15^th Prime Minister at this link: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve15p2/d120Arthur 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.