Brian Mulroney: Meech Lake

Peter Lougheed Dept: "This is a very doable deal," Lougheed said of the meeting the prime minister had called for that day with the premiers on the constitution at Meech Lake. Lougheed had been consulted by both Brian Mulroney and his own successor, Don Getty. He knew the contents of the federal proposal, and he saw it as a low-cost deal for obtaining the signature of Quebec, which was missing on the 1982 Constitution Act patriated with a Charter of Rights, over the objections of Quebec , according to Montreal Gazette. "I don't think we'll get a deal," Mulroney told me at the time. As he later said: "It was only there, at Meech Lake, that the dynamic enabled us to do what we did." Coming out of the Langevin Block on the morning of April 30, 1987, I ran into former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, who was in Ottawa on business. Mulroney also consulted another important former Conservative, Bill Davis of Ontario, who like Lougheed had been at the table in the 1981 round. "Lougheed and Davis both took the view that a final round was needed to bring in Quebec," he later said. "That was their sense of it." (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.