For someone who claims not to want to talk about Meech Lake ("you can't fight old wars") Brian Mulroney sure talks a lot about Meech Lake. Not that he has anything new to say. Ten years to the day after the Meech Lake Accord died in a torrent of recriminations and confusion, Mr. Mulroney is still certain he was right, still bitter and upset at his loss ("I'm neither bitter nor upset"), still flogging the same revisionist history to justify putting the country through the three-year psychodrama that was Meech.

Only now, in addition to rewriting the history of the 1982 patriation struggle as an exercise in "isolating and humiliating" Quebec -- for which alleged sin Meech Lake was supposed to atone -- Mr. Mulroney and his allies have another 10 years of facts to bend.

Indeed, not content with distorting actual historical events, Meech devotees have gone so far as to invent a complete alternative history of the last decade, on the premise that the accord, rather than expire that day in the legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland, had actually passed.

On this imaginative recounting, there would have been no Bloc Quebecois -- though, inconveniently, Lucien Bouchard had already resigned from the cabinet post to which Mr. Mulroney had appointed him, long before Meech collapsed. The Reform party would never have risen to prominence -- the passage of Meech into law, in the teeth of ferocious popular opposition, having apparently mollified the West. Neither the Charlottetown accord nor the referendum of 1995 would have been necessary, as Quebec's "traditional demands" would at last have been satisfied. And the Parti Quebecois would never have been elected again.

Actually, Meech's defenders don't even claim that. What they say, to be precise, is that Meech would have bought constitutional peace for "15 or 20 years." That's a recent quote from Senator Jean-Claude Rivest, Robert Bourassa's top constitutional advisor. Meaning five years from now we'd be right back at it.

But then, according to Mr. Mulroney et al, Meech Lake actually was passed. Or at least the substance of it was, in subsequent enactments, minus the symbolic recognition of Quebec's distinctiveness and the accompanying reconciliation of the province to the 1982 Constitution. "We got all of the anguish," Mr. Mulroney likes to say, "and none of the benefits." We might note, in passing, that this concedes what a lot of Meech critics said at the time: namely, that there were other ways to address Quebec's constitutional demands than the specific formula contained in the accord, despite its proponents' insistence that it was a "seamless web," not a line of which could be changed.

But in fact Mr. Mulroney is talking twaddle. The actual legislative record since 1990 is as far from Meech as Meech was from Quebec's original demands. Let's examine each of the accord's main provisions in turn, starting with the big one, the distinct society clause.

This was to be inserted as the very first clause of the Constitution, after the title. "The Constitution of Canada," it read in part, "shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with ... the recognition that Quebec constitutes within Canada a distinct society." Not a symbolic recognition at all, not even the line in the preamble the Quebec Liberal Party had originally demanded, but an interpretive filter through which the entire Constitution, including the Charter of Rights and the division of powers, was to be read. Whatever impact this might or might not have had -- Mr. Bourassa was quite clear in regarding it as having given Quebec the keys to the constitutional vault -- it is nothing like what actually occurred: a meaningless parliamentary resolution affirming Quebec's distinctiveness.

In the same vein, the provinces have not been handed effective control of the Senate, as Meech had envisaged, via a constitutional requirement that the federal government choose senators from lists of provincial nominees. Nor was the Supreme Court provincialized in the same way.

Some have said the limitations on the federal spending power under the recent social union agreement are as far-reaching as Meech, which guaranteed federal compensation for provinces that opted out of shared-cost social programs, provided their own program was "compatible with the national objectives." This is quite wrong. The social union was an agreement, in which the feds won several important concessions from the provinces; Meech was a set of constitutional amendments, in which the provinces gave up nothing.

Under the social union, Ottawa decides whether provinces have met the conditions for federal funding; under Meech, the courts would have decided. And of course, under the social union, though majority provincial consent would be required to launch any new program, provinces that opted out would get no cash at all.

The federal government did sign immigration agreements with Quebec and other provinces as provided for in Meech, though unlike in Meech, none of these have been given constitutional standing. If the feds decide to take back the powers they have conceded, they can pull out of the agreements. Under Meech, they would have had to amend the Constitution.

Except they couldn't amend the Constitution. In a final act of folly, Meech granted a veto over every significant constitutional change, not only to Quebec, but to every province.

Not the Chretien government's legislation "lending" its veto to the five regions, but a constitutional requirement of unanimous provincial consent -- which itself could not be changed without unanimity. We would have been locked in constitutional irons, forever.

Would that at least have meant "constitutional peace," then? Hardly. Among other oddities, Meech Lake would have amended the Constitution to require first ministers' conferences on the Constitution "at least once each year," in perpetuity. Also an annual conference on the economy. By law. Forever. So in addition to controlling the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Constitution, the premiers would have effectively displaced the federal cabinet as the country's executive branch.

As for distinct society: Either it would indeed have been the conveyor belt for the transfer of powers to Quebec that Mr. Bourassa promised, with whatever reaction this elicited in the rest of the country, or it would not. In which case Quebec would have been betrayed and humiliated again. Either way, we'd be far from constitutional peace.