by Craig Oliver
Trudeau’s marriage seemed to fly in the face of his upbringing and a lifelong dedication to asceticism, discipline, and reason before passion. On this occasion he opted for self-indulgence and pure physicality; in doing so, he rejected his own intellectualism and also a number of other women, accomplished and intelligent, who regarded his choice with silent chagrin, if not bitterness. Margaret, thirty years his junior, was a self-described nature child who had lived a free-spirited life of casual sex and drugs. She was catapulted unprepared into the serious business of being the chatelaine of 24 Sussex Drive, a challenge even for a mature political wife. She bore three sons in quick succession and finally broke under the strain.
Most Canadians admired the dignity with which Trudeau endured the pain and embarrassment of their terribly public breakup. Some closer to the marriage were critical of Trudeau: Rather than try to help Margaret, they felt, he closed down and in effect cut her loose. Her revenge was instinctive and unbridled, as witnessed by her behaviour at one of the annual parliamentary press gallery dinners of the time. Trudeau dreaded these much-anticipated events, at which reporters and politicians made speeches poking fun at one another and sometimes themselves. He was not at home telling funny stories and he detested having to feign friendship with people for whom he often had little respect.
In the fall of 1976, however, Trudeau was at one such dinner, and Margaret was at her most outrageous. During the pre-dinner reception in the Centre Block’s Hall of Honour, Margaret blew marijuana smoke in the face of the RCMP commissioner, who had to pretend not to know what it was. Later, she would not leave the all-night party at the press club on the other side of Wellington Street from the Parliament buildings. A Cabinet minister, Bryce Mackasey, was sent to fetch her, but she dismissed him with the accusation that he was a “little ass kisser.” Finally, Trudeau himself showed up to take his wife home over her loud objections. This was about as humiliating as it could get for a man as proud and private as Trudeau.
A few months later, I broke the story of the couple’s plan to sign a separation agreement. For a full day after the item was broadcast on the CTV national newscast, I fielded calls from newspapers and radio and TV stations around the world, but I declined to elaborate. A close prime ministerial aide had tipped me off about the couple’s intentions. I always believed that Trudeau wanted to end the swirl of rumour and get the facts out without doing so through the usual method of a government press release.
After his separation and divorce three years later, there were many women in his life. (Of all the gossip about him, the rumour that he was gay was the most outlandish.) Late one evening I answered a knock at my door to find a romantic interest of my own on the front step with tears streaming down her cheeks. She told me that Trudeau had dropped her because she was becoming too serious. Another time, I took a particularly interesting young woman to a dinner with Trudeau. She had just returned from the Middle East, where she had narrowly missed being forced into sexual servitude by a member of the local ruling family. The next day, Trudeau tracked down her phone number and invited her over to 24 Sussex for an evening swim. I was not mentioned.
Yet another time, when an attractive female TV personality and I interviewed Trudeau at the CTV studios, the lights on the set had barely dimmed before Trudeau whisked his new acquaintance away for dinner, leaving me eating his dust. Never did I hear any of these women speak disparagingly of him, nor did any of them try to exploit their affairs for momentary fame. Their discretion was amazing, though not all were left enchanted by the experience. On a hiking trip with Trudeau into Banff National Park in 1978, I witnessed a mix-up that caught him out in a genuine faux pas.
The night before the climb, we had met in Trudeau’s suite at the Chateau Lake Louise for pre-dinner drinks. As usual, he had an attractive young woman with him whom he had invited to join us for the next day’s hike. While a small group of us were chatting, a member of Trudeau’s security entourage came over and whispered something in his ear. He reacted by slapping his forehead in a gesture that said Oh, my God. I assumed that he must have received distressing news of serious national import and my reporter’s ears perked up. Moments later, another stunning young woman joined us, and it soon became apparent that the prime minister of Canada had unwittingly double-booked himself. Needless to say, neither of the ladies was happy with the situation.
Trudeau tried gently to push one of the women in my direction, and since I was unaccompanied, nothing would have pleased me more. But she was having none of it. In a manner that would have made any good feminist despair, the two women began to fling catty remarks at each other, deepening Trudeau’s embarrassment. Finally, when it came time for dinner, no further prevarication was possible. He had to decide which woman would sit next to him. After a brief flurry of musical chairs, the woman less favoured made her unhappiness known. She told everyone at the table how she had met a member of the prime minister’s RCMP security detail while on a trip to Hawaii. He told her, she claimed, that so many women were coming and going from 24 Sussex they could not keep track of them all for security purposes. Trudeau replied: “Would you be able to recall that Mountie’s name? I would like to arrange for him to spend the rest of his career mushing huskies in Tuktoyaktuk.”
Trudeau’s third term began with the heady victory of a majority government in 1974, but the mood soon soured. By the next year, the oil crisis was upon us, the economy sank and inflation soared, and Finance Minister John Turner resigned in open defiance of Trudeau’s leadership. Two months later, the government introduced wage-and-price controls to widespread public protest. At the same time, Trudeau was badly distracted by the collapse of his marriage and deeply concerned about the welfare of his sons. Senior aides were instructed that nothing short of a national emergency could be permitted to interfere with his time with the boys. His attention to the job was not what it had been, and his government began to drift.
Despite or perhaps because of the malaise, those were hedonistic times for many in the Liberal government. Trudeau himself never tolerated the use of drugs and drank hardly at all, but among his aides, a few ministers, and the occasional highranking bureaucrat, such recreational consumables were part of the lifestyle. The parties were raunchier, the sex easy, and the pot ubiquitous. It was one protracted end-of-an-era blowout before the 1979 collapse.
Watching Trudeau from the press gallery or from the bow of a canoe was to see a contradiction personified, a man caught between idealism and realism. In his early political days, he sought a dialogue with Canadians based on reason and rationality. Instead, the masses were ready to follow him blindly, without question—the opposite of what he professed to want. The idealism was quickly set aside in 1972, when it looked as if Trudeau might lose his second election campaign. He turned himself over to the party’s backroom boys and submitted to a campaign of endless photo ops in which even his flower-child wife was exploited.
Some denounced Trudeau’s reluctance to get down and dirty in politics, and did their best to help him do it. Such a moment came early in the 1974 election campaign when the campaign managers decided to send Trudeau on a photogenic and seemingly up-close-and-personal train trip. In his private car one morning, Trudeau sat down for coffee with one of his political gurus. The fellow had worked long and hard to keep Trudeau in office and he was blunt. “I would like you to put me in the Senate,” he said. “Absolutely not,” Trudeau replied, and left the room. The individual never did get the reward many thought automatic. Referring to Trudeau’s indignant reaction to this frank appeal for an appointment, one of the campaign staff murmured, “What the hell does he think it’s all about, anyway?”
But by the spring of 1979, Canadians were fed up with the Liberals and with a prime minister who seemed increasingly remote, arrogant, and unconcerned. A fatalistic gloom took hold of the government benches and one senior member of the Cabinet told me frankly that his own government had become “an essentially corrupt operation.” Within weeks of the 1979 ele
ction campaign launch, Trudeau and his aides knew they would lose, yet according to one of them, Colin Kenny, the prime minister never became angry or irritable even as he endured the rigours of cross-country travel and the animosity of hostile crowds.
Kenny recalls that one wet night during a long car ride to some town or other, Trudeau reminisced about another rainy night, this one from his childhood, when he was invited to join his father and his friends at the family kitchen table while they drank, gambled, and told stories. His father made a ten-thousanddollar wager with one of his drinking buddies that depended on which line of raindrops would win the race to the bottom of the windowpane. On another occasion, Trudeau watched while his father and another man stepped outside to settle a fifteenthousand-dollar bet on who could piss the farthest.
According to Kenny, Trudeau was serene and graceful in defeat, telling his devastated staff that the sun would rise the next day and “we will enjoy our lives.” After handing in his resignation to the Governor General a few days later, he hopped into his open 190 SL Mercedes convertible, threw his arms up, and shouted, “Free at last, free at last,” stealing a line from Martin Luther King. In private, however, he seemed lost and even lonely. He buoyed himself by maintaining the conviction that he would be back in office. To most observers, this seemed a delusion. In a capital obsessed with power, the conventional wisdom was that his time was over.
Many Liberals who once would have begged to touch the hem of Trudeau’s coat now were writing him off. Some felt safe in letting old complaints and grievances about him surface. No doubt he felt the hurt of the long fall from power, but he tried not to show it. When I had dinner with him after he’d moved into Stornoway, the Opposition leader’s residence, I found the tables stocked with the house matchboxes from 24 Sussex Drive. He said he had brought them with him to save the Treasury money when he moved back. It was clear to me that he was uncomfortable, however, and I felt sure he would step down as Liberal leader.
Not long after, I got a call from Trudeau asking if I could come over to his office and bring a cameraman. I found him in a rare emotional state. He had decided to quit, he informed me, because he wanted to spend as much time as possible with his sons. He would give me the only television interview on the matter, an extraordinary coup. Shortly after the camera started to roll, I heard a dreaded click from the film magazine. The cameraman had forgotten to reload; we were out of film. Would Trudeau do it all over again, please? No, he would not, and moreover the confessional moment when he was prepared to talk about the overwhelming demands of political leadership had passed. He knew he had revealed his vulnerability and was not about to make the same mistake again. Trudeau’s official announcement of his intention to step down as Liberal leader came in June. Most Canadians believed they had seen the last of him and turned their attention to the newly elected Tories.
It has always been my motto to “stay in with the outs” because the outs have a way of coming back. A crop of younger Conservatives—Don Mazankowski, Ray Hnatyshyn, and John Crosbie—refused to wallow in self-pity and recrimination after their defeat back in 1974, and I was glad to give them airtime while they warmed the Opposition benches. They were a canny lot who knew how to get under the skin of the Liberals, and they made for good television in the process. Like unindicted co-conspirators, reporters cultivate and befriend politicians who are out of power in a way that is impossible with those in the ruling party. I cannot say, though, that Joe Clark was on my radar.
One day in February 1976, I was working in the hot room at the House of Commons when I received a phone call from the office of a Member of Parliament I had never heard of. The Conservative Party national convention had just convened in Ottawa and my caller was a flack from the office of Joe Clark. Clark was a little-known MP from Alberta whose bid for the leadership the press corps regarded as a joke. Did anyone want to do a one-on-one interview with Mr. Clark, was the offer. I covered the mouthpiece and shouted out the question to the room. Laughs and jeers. “Too busy,” I said—a telling tribute to my prescience and that of my colleagues.
The main contenders were Brian Mulroney and Claude Wagner, two Quebecers who despised each other. Wagner was a former Liberal who had run for the leadership of the provincial party, losing to Robert Bourassa. The Conservatives recruited Wagner and he accepted monies from a secret slush fund to make the move, a fact he denied to Mulroney. Wagner was stiff and formal in contrast to Mulroney’s garrulous Irish personality. At the convention, they became locked in a balloting impasse, their respective supporters refusing to change their votes. This allowed Joe Clark to come up the middle and pull off one of the most stunning leadership upsets in history.
A few days later, Clark visited his new office in the Opposition leader’s suite in the East Block and I stood beside him while one of my colleagues tossed on his desk the Toronto Star with the headline “JOE WHO?” across the front. Joe laughed, but it would be years before he could live down that nickname. His receding chin became a symbol of his supposed timidity as a leader, and he was taunted for his physical awkwardness, his wife’s refusal to take his name, and the fact that he had never held a permanent job outside of politics and had no real interests other than a devotion to public policy.
I soon discovered Clark to be better than his critical press: always a thoroughly decent, thoughtful person without an ounce of mean-spiritedness. Yet many looked upon even these admirable qualities as evidence of a weak character. He couldn’t win.
Shortly after he took the Tory leadership, Clark decided to do a tour of British Columbia, perhaps the most disastrous ever seen in Canadian political circles. The party organization failed him completely. En route up the coast, in one small town after another, scheduled events never happened. On more than one occasion, when our Otter float plane pulled up at the local docks, not a soul would be there to greet the new leader. Reporters called taxis for the whole group to get us into one town or another, where more often than not Clark would go unrecognized at public events. When he met with the media, Clark initially insisted that the local press be allowed the first questions. At one stop, the town’s reporter savaged him with charges that he was a loser who wouldn’t survive in the job. Clark, smiling, turned to the national press, and pleaded for some actual questions.
It was in northern British Columbia, where the reception was no better, that Clark locked horns with Mom. I had chronicled this rolling debacle night after night on the national news. Finally and mercifully, we neared the end of the trip, which by sheer coincidence was to wrap up in Prince Rupert. Clark hoped to rescue himself with a final news conference at the Rupert airport. Mom, of course, was there to see me off and sat with me in the press section.
When I stood to ask a question, Maureen McTeer cut me off with an ill-tempered declaration: “There goes Craig Oliver already, crapping on my husband again.” I sat down speechless, but not Mom, who had probably had more than a few drinks by this time. She warned McTeer to shut up and leave her little boy alone, or she would come over and do her serious harm. Clark intervened to cool his wife and I did the same with Mom.
The Vancouver media loved it, presenting the confrontation between a reporter’s mother and the Opposition leader’s wife as a front-page story. Joe Clark made it worse for himself when he denied that Maureen would ever use the word crapping, as the journalists had reported. Their audiotapes proved otherwise and kept the story going for another day. Always the first to do the decent thing, Clark sought me out to apologize, but the incident had made the national news. When I got back to Ottawa, I ran into Trudeau in a Commons corridor. “You have never scared me for a minute,” he said, “but I sure don’t want to run up against your mother!” In 1979, the prime minister’s mantle came too soon for Joe Clark. Being a political leader is like being the lead canine in a dogsled team. You have to be tougher and smarter than all the other dogs and fight to keep your position every day. It was an open secret in Ottawa that there were two hard-core Conservatives whose m
ission it was to bring Clark down: MP Bob Coates and Coates’s chief of staff, Rick Logan. A third individual, Pat McAdam, who worked for Conservative MP Gordon Taylor, was also put on salary at Iron Ore of Canada where Mulroney was president, though his main occupation was to organize against Clark on Mulroney’s behalf. These genial assassins regularly graced the press club or the press gallery hot room, leaking the latest plot against Clark to the eager scribes. It was not in Clark’s character to become as mean, cunning, or duplicitous as some of those who opposed him.
Clark had savoured his election victory for barely twenty-four hours before he undermined his own credibility. During the election campaign, he had promised unwisely to move the Canadian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. All of us knew such a move was impossible; it was an affront to the Arab world that would have cost Canada dearly, and a serious reversal of Canada’s long-running policy on the issue. Of course, the move was bitterly opposed by our own Department of External Affairs, whose mandarins made no secret of their view. We all assumed Clark would drop the campaign rhetoric and gradually let the idea die.
At his first news conference as prime minister, Clark had the opportunity to backtrack. I raised the issue in the opening question. But he insisted on his determination to follow through, adding for good measure that it was time the bureaucrats at External got the message and understood who was in charge. The neophyte was displaying a touch of arrogance. A wiser and more confident leader would have nuanced the issue. Clark felt the need to prove his toughness, but he had stumbled right out of the gate. Eventually former PC leader Robert Stanfield was appointed to make recommendations—“Stanfield of Arabia,” we called him—and of course he told Clark to forget it.
Clark’s able Cabinet soon settled into middle-of-the-road progressive administration, six seats short of a majority but governing well. Sadly, Clark himself was running far behind his party in popularity and respect. The Tories had inherited a large deficit from the free-spending Trudeauites, and a critical policy objective was to bring the budget and the economy back on track.