Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Pearson determined to implement completely the bilingualism recommendations for the federal civil service of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which would not fully report until 1969 but was releasing key parts of its report sequentially.

  Relations between Ottawa and Quebec had been bubbling for some time. In his 1960 visit, Charles de Gaulle had noted the incongruity between French and English Canada, which was, if anything, accentuated when Diefenbaker visited him and assured him that all such concerns would be resolved eventually by bilingualism, attempting to underline his point by speaking in French and doing so “with great difficulty” (as de Gaulle neutrally commented while commending the Canadian leader’s motives). It could be reasonably inferred that what Diefenbaker meant was that eventually the French Canadians and a somewhat increased number of English Canadians would be bilingual. As the decade passed, and especially after de Gaulle’s rather ambitious efforts to revive a triumvirate – like that of Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George – with the Americans and British at the head of the Western Alliance was declined, and he had made his peace in Algeria, and France had become a nuclear power with a stable government and currency, de Gaulle reverted to his chosen method for gaining for France the status he believed his country, or at least he personally, deserved. As when he had, from a position of great dependency, defied Churchill and Roosevelt between 1941 and 1944, he now set out to convince the “Anglo-Saxons,” as he habitually described them (the Americans and the British), that they underestimated France and him.

  De Gaulle’s was a difficult position. He knew better than anyone what a terrible humiliation France had endured in 1940, which made his action more heroic when, as he wrote, he “assumed France” and brought with him to London in his little airplane “the honour of France,” as Churchill put it, in 1940. He wished to be the co-leader of Western Europe, but that would require Britain to uncouple somewhat from America and join him in that endeavour. France could not compete with the United States for the favour of the British. However upstaged the British might be by the Americans, whatever their affection for France as a beautiful and rich neighbouring country that had mastered the arts of civilization, the power of the United States and its indispensability for the defence of the West were beyond challenge. De Gaulle sought from the Americans a status for France equivalent to what Britain enjoyed, but France had not really measured up as an ally. Apart from the contrast in its contributions to Allied victory in the Second World War, pre-Gaullist France had blundered catastrophically in Indochina while the British showed great agility in exiting Malaya and defeating the communists there, and, though uneasy about it, had not hindered the entry of Germany into NATO, which France had tried to block.

  The Americans, seconded by the British and Canadians and the French themselves, had achieved the liberation of France in 1944, and starting on the day that Eisenhower had arranged for Free French units to appear to be clearing the Germans from Paris, de Gaulle, for commendable (and anti-communist) reasons, had propagated the myth that France had never left the war and had largely accomplished its own liberation. Though always generous personally to those who had led the Allies, especially Churchill and Eisenhower, de Gaulle had followed the example of the Habsburgs from the previous century and “astounded the world by [his] ingratitude.”

  The dreadful failure of Suez had demonstrated that it was impossible to resurrect the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale; Eisenhower and Kennedy and Macmillan had rejected a retrieval of the Grand Alliance of 1917 to 1919, de Gaulle turned seventy-five in 1965 (when he was re-elected to a second seven-year term as president), and time was running out. Where Eisenhower had been pushing a unified NATO military under U.S. command, Kennedy had tried a Multilateral Force, which would, effectively, have placed Americans in charge of British and French nuclear weapons. Outrageous though de Gaulle’s conduct sometimes became, his impatience with the American inability to grasp that the Europeans, in their gratitude for liberation and the Marshall Plan, did not all want to become satellites of the United States, was understandable. Ironically, if de Gaulle had been a little more careful politically and taken better care of himself so that he served to the end of his second term, he could have got something close to the alliance he sought with the Anglo-Americans, under the Euro-integrationist Edward Heath and the sophisticated pro-Gaullist, and personal friend, Richard Nixon. But de Gaulle left office just after Nixon’s inauguration in 1969 and died shortly after Heath’s election in 1970.

  As he saw the sands running out, de Gaulle donned his Joan of Arc outfit from the Casablanca Conference (as Roosevelt described him) and made his historic rapprochement with Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany; threw his weight behind the Arabs in their conflict with Israel; barred the United Kingdom from the European Economic Community; exchanged ambassadors with China; denounced the American involvement in Indochina; set himself at the head of a great swath of Third World and Eurocentric, and even Latin American, opinion, as well as the “community” of former French colonial puppet states he had created in Africa; and tantalized the Russians with the thought of splintering the West if they truckled with adequate fervour to Paris.

  All the while, de Gaulle retained the ultimate default position of French adherence to the Western Alliance, as he demonstrated in rallying instantly and unconditionally to Eisenhower at the summit conference in Paris in 1960, which Khrushchev broke up over the U-2 espionage plane affair, and in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He emphasized this by leading the foreign mourners at the mighty state funerals of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Winston Churchill in 1965, Konrad Adenauer in 1966, and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1969. His foreign policy was ultimately an artistic aggregation of confidence tricks, and it was a personal confection from his own frustrations at the shortcomings of France in 1940 and its shortsightedness in not following his advice in 1945, and his having to wait until 1958 for the Fourth Republic to flounder to an end. He was an unbidden and extraordinary source for a blow to Canadian unity. It was outrageous and mistaken, but in the autumn of his days, Charles de Gaulle, a leader of the stature of Churchill and Roosevelt, and the great outsider, in his quest for methods of tormenting his allies and liberators, embraced a romantic vision of a resurrected New France in Quebec.

  Quebec had opened an agency-general in Paris in 1961. (Duplessis had promised this in his last year, as he approved of de Gaulle but was contemptuous of the ephemeral regimes of the Fourth Republic, having outlasted as premier of Quebec in his second term the entire twelve years of that republic, which saw twenty-one French governments.) Pearson and Martin had visited Paris starting on January 15, 1964. De Gaulle received them cordially, and it was agreed that there would be regular consultations between the two governments. De Gaulle had referred sarcastically to the Commonwealth as a British “caravan” when he vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community in 1963. He had already begun courting Quebec, an eagerly willing recipient of such overtures. Jules Léger, a career diplomat and brother of the cardinal archbishop of Montreal, was named Canadian ambassador to France in 1964, succeeding Pierre Dupuy, whom de Gaulle had not forgiven for being the Canadian representative Mackenzie King had assigned to Vichy in 1940, after he appointed General Georges Vanier, the current governor general, to represent Canada to the Free French. When Léger presented his letters of credence to de Gaulle, the president of France sarcastically read aloud that accreditation was requested by “Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”

  There were already a number of problems in France-Canada relations, and Pearson, for an accomplished diplomat, and especially one who had first become acquainted with de Gaulle in London during the war and had always recognized his qualities, had been very insensitive. Whatever the competing merits, much would have been accomplished if Air Canada (as Pearson renamed Trans-Canada Airlines) had bought the French manufactured Caravelle airliner instead of American competitors. He could also have been more astute in his NATO policy and would have lost nothing b
y supporting the French rejection of the Multilateral Force project; it was a foolish idea and the British opposed it also, though Macmillan allowed de Gaulle to make most of the running. (This was the issue that led to the Nassau meeting Diefenbaker crashed in 1963, when the Skybolt missile was scuttled but it was agreed that the United States would help Britain, but not France, and enable it to take the Polaris submarine. The “Anglo-Saxons” brought a considerable amount of de Gaulle’s wrath down on themselves.) Martin and Pearson even had an amateurish stab at appeasement. On December 13, 1964, Martin announced that Canada was opposed to any NATO policy that was unacceptable to France, and on February 10, 1965, Pearson gave a speech in Ottawa in which he said that perhaps NATO should pursue somewhat different goals in Europe and North America. This was a nonsensical concept, considering that the United States provided 85 per cent of the muscle for the entire alliance, and it was an ad hoc, slapdash effort, not part of a coherent effort to head de Gaulle off from wholesale meddling and mischief-making in Quebec, which Pearson and Martin could reasonably have assumed by now was a possibility.

  Most important, and probably decisive in the shattering of France-Canada relations that was afoot, was Pearson’s decision not to meet French terms for the acquisition of Canadian uranium, though it came from Pearson’s own constituency of Algoma East and the industry gave his voters employment. This was one of the biggest blunders of Pearson’s career, and despite his many successes he was very fallible in certain areas. Having promised the sale of uranium to France in his visit of 1964 to Paris, in 1965 he decided that Canada’s membership in the International Atomic Energy Agency and its status as a signatory of the Test Ban Treaty required that Canada be assured that its uranium was only destined for civil purposes. This was considered by de Gaulle, with some reason, to be provocative, both as a change of terms and as a different basis from that on which uranium was sold to the United States and the United Kingdom. Pearson naïvely thought he could address the issue by applying, henceforth, the same standards to sales of uranium to Great Britain. He had not, even at this late date of June 1965, the remotest idea with what or whom he was dealing.

  In February 1965, Quebec and France had signed a cultural entente. Education minister Paul Gérin-Lajoie and Premier Jean Lesage’s assistant for intergovernmental affairs, Claude Morin, went to Paris without a word to Ottawa and purported to have the authority to sign international agreements in provincial areas of jurisdiction. In the summer of 1965, an accord cadre was signed between Quebec and Paris that would permit agreements on specific subjects of provincial concern, and Lesage showed a reasonable concern for federal sensibilities. Paul Martin, as external affairs secretary, was relatively relaxed, but Pearson, whose diplomatic antennae were more experienced and sensitive, partly because he had worked under O.D. Skelton and Mackenzie King in the 1920s and 1930s as Canada gradually assumed complete autonomy of Britain in a long series of gradual steps, was uneasy.

  The conventional wisdom in the Quebec and English media was that Jean Lesage and his Liberals had freed Quebec from the priest-ridden, patronage-sodden, semi-feudal Huey Long political slapstick farce of the Great Darkness where Duplessis had imprisoned it while the world passed it by, and that out of gratitude the province would keep them in power for a long time (the Quebec Liberals had had thirty-nine uninterrupted years in office prior to Duplessis). But in the Quebec election of June 5, 1966, held on a Sunday in emulation of France, Daniel Johnson led the Union Nationale to a narrow victory, with fifty-six members of the Legislative Assembly to fifty Liberals and two independents, although Lesage won the popular vote, 47 to 41 per cent, because of the customary heavy Liberal majority among the non-French. For the first time, there was an appreciable outright separatist vote, 9 per cent between two parties, 6 per cent for the larger Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance Nationale, led by Pierre Bourgault. As usual, the Pearson government was caught absolutely flat-footed by Quebec events, and no one had any idea if Johnson would continue Lesage’s policies of striking up closer relations with de Gaulle. Duplessis’s formula had been to get the conservatives and nationalists to vote together and the Liberals were trying to take the nationalist card away from the Union Nationale. Johnson ran against the tax increases and deficits that Lesage had run up as he secularized everything and handed a blank cheque to the public sector unions, and against increased electricity costs that the complete state takeover of electricity in 1962 was supposed to have prevented. But he also revived the traditional claim of his party that only the Union Nationale could deal for Quebec because the Quebec Liberals were bound hand and foot to the federal Liberal Party (the last five Quebec Liberal leaders, including acting leaders, had all been federal MPs or senators at one point: Adélard Godbout, Télesphore-Damien Bouchard, George Marler, Georges-Émile Lapalme, and Lesage). Johnson was an intimate protégé and emulator of Duplessis and the most assiduous disciple of the techniques of Le Chef. Duplessis had saved his career after Johnson’s wife was involved with a lover who shot and wounded her and then killed himself. Johnson had few of Duplessis’s bad qualities and most of his good qualities, except, like Paul Sauvé, he was not as physically robust as Duplessis was. He did not lose much time picking up relations with de Gaulle where Lesage had left them. He was not a separatist but believed in as much autonomy as possible for Quebec without losing the economic benefits of Confederation, and he saw the potential utility of the interventions of the man who was then, on the entire world stage, rivalled in prestige and stature only by Mao Tse-tung. Johnson was a Quebec leader of great dexterity, and he was more than ready to take advantage of the general’s patronage. Both men got more than they bargained for.

  General Vanier, an old friend of de Gaulle’s, as a wounded and heroic veteran of Vimy, and as a diplomat and passionate supporter of Free France, offered to visit de Gaulle as Paris-Ottawa relations tensed, but the French leader, though “touched,” did not accept that, as governor general of Canada, Vanier was a chief of state and he would not accept him with the honours of one. Pearson was outraged and the idea was scrapped. The conditions of de Gaulle’s visit to Canada in 1967 became the subject of intense and prolonged controversy. He was coming ostensibly to celebrate the centenary of Confederation and visit the Expo 67 world’s fair at Montreal that Duplessis had envisioned, the last part of his trifecta of placatory gestures to Quebec’s nationalists (after the Quebec flag and the agency-general in Paris). It was customary to invite the chief of state of every country that was represented at the fair. In addition, Johnson invited de Gaulle to Quebec in his own capacity as leader of the provincial government, which came as a revelation to Ottawa, as did many other quasi-diplomatic rendezvous arranged between Quebec and French officials. It eventually became known to Ottawa, first as a rumour, that de Gaulle intended to come to Canada by ship. This would enable him to land at Quebec rather than the federal capital and should have been more disquieting to Ottawa than it was. Officially, de Gaulle came by ship (the cruiser Colbert, named after Jean Talon’s patron) in order to stop at Saint-Pierre and Miquelon and show his thanks to those islands for rallying to him in 1941. Of course, this was spurious, as he could have taken a small plane there and back from Quebec or could have returned to France by ship and stopped there. Pearson and Martin blundered again when they agreed that de Gaulle would come first to Quebec, then Montreal, and then Ottawa, thinking in their conventional parameters that the visitor would be careful not to be too provocative if his trip was to end in the federal capital, though he had already evinced no interest in going to English Canada at all.

  If Pearson and his advisers had thought it through and understood Quebec better, much less France, it would have been possible to work around the personalities and ambitions involved. Johnson, whom the Liberals at both echelons had completely discounted as a yokel whistling in a political graveyard, was a stronger premier than Lesage and less prone to be propelled forward by the nationalists. De Gaulle himself was now winging it on a romantic mission
civilisatrice according to which he was a virtual Richelieu bringing succour to a fragment of ancient French settlers abandoned by la mère patrie, who, though in many ways more advanced a society than France, “spoke the language of Molière’s peasants in their farmyards.”1 (This was unmitigated rubbish. They did not speak like seventeenth-century peasants, and it is particularly irritating to read de Gaulle’s biographer Jean Lacouture describe Johnson’s French in these terms. Like an educated Canadian or American speaking English, Johnson had a Canadian accent but a refined and acoustically unexceptionable one, like most leading Quebeckers.) De Gaulle’s emissary Gilbert Pérol claimed to have been frostily received in Ottawa2 and warning signals multiplied: de Gaulle boycotted the observations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian victory at Vimy in April 1917, having failed to send an appropriate representative to the funeral of Vanier at the end of 1966. These were churlish and contemptible actions, but still Pearson and Martin had no idea what might happen, though they were certainly concerned. Publicly, as the centennial year got under way, all was peaceful as a mill pond. Pearson met Johnson, and Martin called on de Gaulle, both in April 1967, and Martin again saw de Gaulle on June 14, just a month before the visit. Though both sessions were cordial, neither Johnson nor de Gaulle shed any light on what was coming. Johnson did say, as Lesage had been in the habit of doing, that he had to tread carefully because of the nationalists in his own party. Fundamentally, Pearson and Martin just did not believe that the leader of a friendly country, which owed Canada as much as Canada owed it, and for a debt incurred much more recently, could do very nasty things to such a well-intentioned and unoffending country. It was the price of serving so long in the ever-protective shadow of the Anglo-Americans. This time, unlike thirty years before, the world, in Roosevelt’s phrase, “would stand idly by” and Canada would have to sort it out for itself.