Pierre Elliott Trudeau

by Nino Ricci

  Cité libre provided Trudeau perhaps exactly the sort of vehicle he needed to re-enter the political world of Quebec, one suited both to his skills and to his temperament. It allowed him a public forum without requiring him to buy into any of the existing political structures, most of which he now had little respect for. The first issue of the journal contained an article whose title, “Politique fonctionelle,” or functional politics, would come to define his own political stance over the next years. “We want to bear witness to the Christian and French fact in America. Fine; so be it. But let’s get rid of all the rest.” He was staking out the same territory as the nationalists, in others words, but not their methods. Rather, he was subjecting “to methodical doubt all the political categories relegated to us by the previous generation,” such as the appeal to solidarity against the long list of imagined enemies, “communists, the English, Jews, imperialists, centralizers, demons, free-thinkers, and I don’t know what else.” This was a far cry from the rhetoric of the Trudeau of a mere six years earlier. It was as if he was shedding his old self, ready to start anew from first principles. “Let’s batter down the totems, let’s break the taboos. Better yet, let’s consider them null and void. Let us be coolly intelligent.”

  This was the tone that Cité libre was to keep under Trudeau’s reign. He had found an idiom, a way back to the language of protest he had always been most comfortable with, through an inversion that relegated what he himself had been to “the previous generation.” Not a language of flight or remorse but of moving forward, of accepting a challenge. Cité libre would remain true to the challenge, tackling the federal government, the provincial one, even the church, despite the fact that the church, through its index of banned publications, had the power to shut the journal down.

  In an article in one of the journal’s early issues, Trudeau attacked the church’s interference in secular affairs and poked fun at the “divine right” in which bishops cloaked themselves. The jibe provoked a caustic response in a Jesuit publication from one of Trudeau’s favourite teachers at Brébeuf, Father Marie d’Anjou, as well as a summons for both Trudeau and Pelletier from the new Archbishop of Montreal, Paul-Émile Léger. Trudeau was rattled by the attack from d’Anjou, who had been one of his collaborators in les X, but at the meeting with Léger, who maintained a chilly diplomatic courtesy throughout, Trudeau refused to recant. Pelletier later described the encounter in his book Years of Impatience.

  Trudeau … defended his position so sharply that the Archbishop was moved to say: “If I were to condemn the review … it would be with great regret, believe me.”

  “And we,” interrupted Trudeau, “would appeal to the universal Church, as is our right.”

  The Archbishop, disconcerted, stared strangely at Trudeau. He hesitated a moment, then went on to his next point. I have a lively recollection of those few moments during which, I believe, the fate of Cité libre was decided in the incredible atmosphere of a medieval dispute.

  This sort of challenge required a rare strength of character in the Quebec of those years, particularly coming from someone who remained in his heart a committed Catholic. Yet despite Trudeau’s many successes of this sort and the tremendous personal energies he put into Cité libre, to people around him he often seemed adrift in this period. His only other major projects during the 1950s were the collection of essays he put together, at Pelletier’s request, on the Asbestos Strike, and a brief he prepared on behalf of the Quebec unions for a royal commission on federal–provincial relations. Interestingly, the brief, which actually garnered wide attention both in Quebec and in the rest of the country, took the view that economic issues were much more important than constitutional ones, and that workers needed adequate incomes more than they needed “constitutional guarantees of their religious, cultural, and political evolution.” Many of Trudeau’s critics in his latter years as prime minister, when Trudeau would keep hammering at constitutional reform while the deficit spiralled and interest rates and unemployment were in the double digits, might have made the same argument.

  At the end of the decade, Trudeau, now forty, still seemed to have little to show for all the promise he had had as a young man. “Perhaps I seem superficial about certain things,” Trudeau had written in his journal back at Brébeuf. “But the truth is that I work.” This was as true of him in the 1950s as it had been at Brébeuf, but for all his activities, there was an air to him of someone who had never stepped fully into his own life. He was essentially jobless; he was unmarried. He might be in the midst of some project, then suddenly disappear on a months-long jaunt to Europe. He had become a frequent media commentator, on everything from politics to his hair-raising adventures abroad—this was the period in which Marshall McLuhan first noticed him—but this sort of exposure merely contributed to the impression that he was a dilettante. His forays into politics had been disillusioning: it seemed that no matter what tactics he and his fellow Cité libre-ists tried, whether they supported established opposition parties or set up parties or coalitions of their own, whenever elections rolled around, Duplessis always came out the victor. It wasn’t just bribery and intimidation that kept him in power; it was that much of the electorate revered him, seeing in him exactly the sort of authority figure they had always looked to for leadership.

  In retrospect, however, Trudeau and Cité libre came to be remembered as a focal point for reform-minded Quebecers of the time, and many of those who proved important in the Quiet Revolution got their introduction to politics in the intellectual milieu that coalesced around Cité libre. In the Quebec of the 1950s, this was no small accomplishment. This was a society that in one decade had had to live out a century of social evolution—and come to grips with the fact that it was not the self-sufficient peasant theocracy of its myths, but a modern, urban, industrialized society that could no longer hold out the forces of the greater world. The group that had formed around Cité libre was like a government-in-waiting, readying its program, biding its time until its moment came, and Trudeau was very much at the centre of it.

  IT WAS AN IRONY that when the moment did come, it was not through the efforts of people like Trudeau but through Duplessis’s sudden death in 1959, and then the sudden death of his promising successor, Paul Sauvé, shortly thereafter. By sheerest providence the solid ranks of the Union Nationale were unexpectedly split, and in June of 1960 the Liberals of Jean Lesage stepped into the breach and managed to scramble their way into power. In the next years, Lesage’s Quiet Revolution would transform Quebec. This was exactly the break Trudeau had been fighting for, yet almost at once he became one of the Revolution’s most vocal critics.

  By this point Trudeau had very clear ideas about the role of government in a democracy, along with an increasing appreciation of Canadian federalism. His only actual experience of Canada west of Ottawa at the time seems to have been on a family car trip in 1940, when he had been much more taken with the country’s natural world than its human one, and yet the idea of Canada appealed to him. In Federalism and the French Canadians, Trudeau, in somewhat of a shift from his Privy Council days, still argued for respecting the constitutional division of powers, but suggested Canadian federalism had failed not in its giving too little power to Quebec but in its giving too much. Ideally, for him, federalism ought to have prevented exactly the Quebec situation of the 1950s: economic disparity, cultural isolation, and a province controlling powers it had no special aptitude for exploiting. What appealed to Trudeau, however, was that when properly administered, federalism could provide a very practical system of checks and balances, with centre and region each wielding the powers most suited to it, and with the opposition between them preventing either from exercising a tyrannical dominance.

  Underlying Trudeau’s arguments was his sense that it was only within a federal system that Quebec could avoid the risks inherent in ethnic nationalism. The sort of independent Quebec he had dreamed of as a young man, he saw now, would only have given greater rein to the ruling elites to ex
ploit nationalism for their own ends, as Duplessis had done. In a Quebec obsessed with the survival of French-Canadian culture it was too easy for leaders to manipulate the electorate by promoting vague ideological goals rather than more practical ones, such as those of providing infrastructure and employment. A well-functioning federalism, on the other hand, could limit the appeal of this sort of demagoguery by ensuring protections against assimilation at the federal level as well as the provincial one.

  In the ferment of the Quiet Revolution, however, such dispassionate views quickly began to seem out of step with the spirit of the times. The new crop of intellectuals, such as the founders of the journal Parti pris—who had initially looked to the Cité libre-ists as “our fathers,” but who quickly parted ways with them—could not understand how Trudeau could continue to make such cold, logical arguments, with their legalistic niceties, in the face of what they saw as two hundred years of English oppression. Those who knew Trudeau well, of course, never described him as cold but rather as a man of deep feeling, even if he often hid it. “Let us be coolly intelligent,” he had written in the first issue of Cité libre, and that had become his public stance, his mask. But the same issue had included heartfelt tributes from him to two thinkers recently dead, Léon Blum and Trudeau’s old mentor, Harold Laski, “deux marxistes juifs” who had “distinguished themselves without cease by their intelligence, by their valiance, and by their tireless generosity.” Bemoaning Canada’s support for the Korean War and for America’s Cold War logic, Trudeau praised Laski and Blum for being among those who had never subscribed to either of the totalitarianisms, but rather had “consecrated their lives to elaborating and agitating for a doctrine that advanced the cause of liberty, justice and peace. As was inevitable, they were hysterically denounced and hatefully reproached, as much by the orthodox Marxist camp as by the party of official Christianity.”

  The memorial to Laski must have had particular significance for Trudeau. Beneath his “coolly intelligent” mask, surely, was the memory of how his own, earlier totalitarianism had lessened his humanity, leading him to demonize others on the basis of race. Now Trudeau could hear the old language of ethnic nationalism beginning to creep into the rhetoric of the Lesage government. At the urging of Minister of Natural Resources René Lévesque—who had left his job as the popular host of a TV newsmagazine to join Lesage’s Liberals—the government was proposing to nationalize Quebec’s mainly English-owned hydroelectricity companies, which had long been a symbol for Quebecers of English domination. For Trudeau, the issue was not the proposal itself but the slogan under which it was being promoted: maîtres chez nous, masters in our own home. The new regime, even if it leaned left rather than right, was beginning to sound like the old one to Trudeau. Rather than making sound economic arguments for its actions, it was resorting to the old ideologies, using the familiar cry of repelling the enemy at the gates.

  As the Lesage government grew more nationalistic, the new crop of young intellectuals grew more openly separatist in their beliefs and more revolutionary in their rhetoric. Trudeau was appalled to hear young people in universities speaking out against democracy or arguing for the necessity of totalitarianism during revolutionary movements. It all must have sounded familiar to him, though it must also have made him wonder if the province had taken a step forward only to take two back.

  In a 1962 article in Cité libre, “The New Treason of the Intellectuals,” Trudeau laid out in clear terms his objections to the separatists and the new nationalists, blaming ethnic-based nationalism for “the most devastating wars, the worst atrocities, and the most degrading collective hatred” of the previous two hundred years. All of Quebec’s desired reforms, he argued, could be accomplished within the existing federation. Once more he took the view that Quebec’s focus ought to be on the pressing economic and practical issues facing the province. “A nation or people has only so much intellectual energy to spend on a revolution,” he had said in his interview with Peter Gzowski. “If the intellectual energy of French Canada is spent on such a futile and foolish cause as separatism, the revolution that is just beginning here can never be brought about.”

  It was around this time that Trudeau fell in with a young man he would end up keeping close to him through the whole of his political career, Marc Lalonde. Lalonde had actually gone to Trudeau in Ottawa back in 1949, when he was twenty, to seek advice on his studies, just as Trudeau himself had sought advice a few years earlier from Henri Bourassa and André Laurendeau. Trudeau must have made an impression on Lalonde then, because in the early 1960s, Lalonde invited him to join a sort of think tank he and some like-minded friends had put together. Lalonde, by his own route, had come to some of the same conclusions as Trudeau about Quebec nationalism. He would also, by his own route, end up in Ottawa at the same time as Trudeau, hired on by Pearson as a constitutional adviser. Lalonde had done his graduate work at Oxford, during a period when it was a hotbed of radicalism, and he credited that period away from Quebec as having opened his mind to a much broader understanding of Quebec’s place in the world, much as Trudeau’s own studies abroad had done for him. It would be Lalonde who would give up his Christmas holiday in 1967 to set the wheels in motion for Trudeau’s possible candidacy for the Liberal leadership, and it would be Lalonde who, as Pearson’s constitutional adviser, would stage-manage Trudeau’s role in the constitutional talks of early 1968 that would bring Trudeau such public prominence. It would also be to Lalonde, and not to Pelletier or Marchand, that Trudeau would turn for advice in February of that year, just before declaring his candidacy.

  Together now with Trudeau, Lalonde’s group produced a manifesto in 1964 in which the term functional politics again figured very prominently. If his province was moving backward, Trudeau himself must have felt as if he was standing still. Fourteen years after the launch of Cité libre he was still pushing the same platform, and was still no closer to realizing it. Change had happened in Quebec, dramatic change, and yet it seemed, just as Trudeau had predicted in an article in 1960, that French Canadians would “once again miss the turn.”

  Perhaps he was the one, however, who had missed the turn. At least he had been able to get a job now, teaching at the Université de Montréal, yet halfway into his forties he found himself a mere academic, for all the ambitions he had had. Even Cité libre was slipping from him, caught up in a factionalism to which his own anti-nationalist views had given rise. The moment had come for change, and he had not been part of it. When the chance had come to replace the Union Nationale after Duplessis’s death, several of Trudeau’s colleagues and friends had run for the Lesage Liberals as René Lévesque had. Trudeau, however, had been down in Key West during the campaign, attempting to paddle to Cuba in a homemade canoe. Lévesque later claimed that Trudeau, too, had been asked to run, but others said he had never been approached.

  The academic Léon Dion, father of the future Liberal leader Stéphane, had once described Trudeau as Quebec’s “most fascinating and disappointing intellectual of the 1950s.” It must have looked to Trudeau as if the 1960s would serve him no better.

  Then came the call from Jean Marchand.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Just Watch Me

  “An election is not a beauty contest,” NDP Leader Tommy Douglas said after Trudeau’s victory in 1968, echoing the feeling of many even within the Liberal Party that Trudeau had come to power more on show than on substance. There was plenty of truth to the charge, though part of Trudeau’s success had come exactly from playing down his actual assets. In 1969, he told The New Yorker that he had “probably read more of Dostoevski, Stendhal, and Tolstoy than the average statesman, and less of Keynes, Mill, and Marx,” even though he had read plenty of the latter three. This image of himself as being above the usual hurly-burly of politics had by then become part of his positioning. Already he was referring to himself as a “statesman” rather than a mere politician, a profession whose bad repute he had recognized all the way back in his play, Dupés.
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  The truth was that much less separated Trudeau from his two main rivals in the House, Douglas of the NDP and Robert Stanfield of the Progressive Conservatives, than met the eye. Stanfield was only five years his senior, and would outlive him, and both he and Douglas probably shared more general culture with Trudeau than Trudeau shared with the hippie generation he had become associated with. In Terence McKenna’s 1994 documentary series on Trudeau, Trudeau admitted that he felt bad for Stanfield, who simply didn’t have the right image for the times, but to whom he was probably more closely allied in both temperament and outlook than to the made-up Trudeau of Trudeaumania. As for Douglas, he was a much more logical political father for Trudeau than Pearson had been, and surely part of Trudeau’s strategy of running more on image than substance had been to hide that fact.

  Trudeau later said of the fans who had fuelled Trudeaumania that he wondered “how closely they were listening to my ideas, which sometimes I expounded rather dully.” He had good cause to wonder, given that many of those fans, like the girls who had chased him up Parliament Hill, were teens still several years from voting age and couldn’t have been much interested in theories of federalism. Within months of Trudeau’s election, that sort of star-struck adulation had lost much of its currency and the media emphasis had already begun to shift from a kind of boosterism to a mix of voyeurism and censure. At a Commonwealth conference in London early in 1969, Canadian reporters stalked Trudeau on his various forays into the city and on his dates with German jetsetter Eva Rittinghausen and actress Jennifer Hales, then filed stories suggesting he was spending more time living the life of the playboy than meeting his obligations as Canada’s leader. At the end of the conference, Trudeau, just before rushing off to join Barbra Streisand and Princess Margaret for the London premiere of Funny Girl, gave reporters the first of the many tongue-lashings he was to administer to them over the years, lambasting them for their “crummy behaviour” and warning he might start prying into their lives as they had pried into his. “I think you once agreed when I said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation; I could even say that the nation has no place in the bedrooms of the state, and certainly not the press.” What seemed particularly to get Trudeau’s goat was that reporters had tracked down Rittinghausen, who had given several indiscreet interviews before falling mum, and had hounded Hales to the point where she had left her apartment for several days. Ironically, the coverage Trudeau received turned him into an instant celebrity among Londoners and completely stole the thunder of the other heads of state gathered there.