by Conrad Black
As the Quebec delegates to the April Liberal convention lined up solidly behind Trudeau, he emerged as the favourite; followed by Robert Winters as the candidate of the pro-business, C.D. Howe wing; the thirty-eight-year-old minister of consumer and corporate affairs, John Turner; the runner-up from the previous convention a decade before, Paul Martin; and the defence minister, Paul Hellyer. Trudeau, as justice minister, had amended the Criminal Code to liberalize treatment of sex between consenting same-sex adults, famously stating that there was “no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” He also liberalized divorce rules, which had been dealt with from Quebec in the House of Commons because of the hostility of the Roman Catholic Church to the concept of divorce. This facilitated his campaign as an advocate of individual liberties rather than someone preoccupied with the concentration of jurisdictional powers. Just before the convention, Mitchell Sharp folded his candidacy in favour of Trudeau in exchange for the promise of the ministry of external affairs.* On the eve of the leadership vote, April 5, 1968, Trudeau gave a clear hint of the astuteness he would bring to the defence of the federalist cause by concluding his address to the convention: “Maîtres chez nous, mais pour tout le Canada.” (“Masters in our own house, but our house is all Canada.”) Trudeau thus staked out his position as the ultra-federalist, but also the chief civil libertarian, and he espoused the entire emerging program of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission (the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism) of access to federal government services, broadcasting, television, and labelling in both languages throughout the country. There were many who hoped that this formula – the entrenchment of human rights and official bilingualism from sea to sea – would calm the issue. Anyone who knew the Quebec nationalists knew otherwise. As Pearson handed over, his party gave him a puppy he had previously said he did not want, but which he accepted when for public relations reasons the organizers insisted.
On April 6, 1968, Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000), forty-eight, became leader of the Liberal Party and two weeks later the fifteenth prime minister of Canada. Showing how completely Charles de Gaulle dissented from and underestimated the Canadian tradition of pulling French and English interests together when sorely tested, he wrote his ambassador in Ottawa on April 10: “We have no concession or even courtesy to extend to M. Trudeau, who is an enemy of the French fact in Canada.” De Gaulle didn’t understand the complexities of the issue, and Trudeau was about to sweep the country, especially Quebec, while the general’s own domestic tranquility blew up. He soon dissolved Parliament for new elections on June 25, the day after the national holiday of French Canada, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. In the campaign, he represented the Conservatives as having folded before the demands of the Quebec nationalists with their endorsement of two nations (a spurious charge), and Robert Stanfield, though an earnest seeker and practitioner of French-English conciliation, was anomalous in claiming to wish to do more for Quebec than the French-Canadian Trudeau. A million people, as usual, lined the streets of Montreal for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Parade, where the reviewing stand was in front of the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec on Sherbrooke Street East at Parc La Fontaine. On this night, the separatists, led by Pierre Bourgault (who had folded his Rassemblement pour l’Indépendance Nationale into Lévesque’s new Parti Québécois), organized a considerable demonstration, and Drapeau had not deployed an adequate number of police to deal with it at the outset. The reviewing stand was raked with stones, bottles, and other projectiles, and the crowd charged the stand, whence all the dignitaries fled except Trudeau, until the police had beaten the demonstrators back. This image, of Trudeau alone facing the rock-throwing mob, was extremely helpful on election eve and was representative of his flinty confidence and determination, and the following day he was rewarded with the first Liberal majority since 1953.
The election result (with 1965 results in brackets) was: Liberals, 154 MPs and 45.4 per cent of the vote (128 MPs and 40.2 per cent); Progressive Conservatives, 72 MPs and 31.4 per cent (97 MPs and 32.4 per cent); NDP, 22 MPs and 17 per cent (22 MPs and 18 per cent); Ralliement Créditistes, 14 MPs and 4.4 per cent (9 MPs and 4.6 per cent). Paul Martin and Robert Winters had not sought re-election. Nor, of course, had Pearson, but John Diefenbaker was re-elected to his tenth consecutive term and would soldier on as in the past, and for more than another decade. This was at least the merciful end of the hair-raising decade in which Pearson bustled about giving pep rallies, steadily renovating the Liberal ranks and doing useful things interspersed with committing frightful mistakes, striving earnestly and rather intelligently for good and sensible reform government but constantly having the ceiling plaster brought down around his shoulders by the ear-rattling and dangerous antics of the bejowelled prairie madman in the attic.
Lester Bowles Pearson had been an innovative and even important prime minister, and while he backed away from Walter Gordon’s curbs on foreign ownership, and went slowly, he did resolve the defence debacle Diefenbaker had created; bring a national health-care system forward; launch official bilingualism seriously; give the country a flag it soon came to like and certainly needed; start the process of regional economic equality, an essential arm against the rising separatist tide; and, above all, bring in the cadres of credible French-Canadian federalists who could alone hold the line in the sudden crisis of Quebec’s orientation. It was all almost too much for him, but not quite. He had been, in the end, a convivial and purposeful leader, with few illusions of his own frailties. He was the weakest individual in the chain from Baldwin and LaFontaine who had intuitively understood what Canada could be and how to keep the project going. He and all his friends in the Skelton foreign service and in like-minded American circles to whom he was the right type of Canadian – altruistic, soft-spoken, bright, and companionable in his bow tie and personal and national self-deprecation – all the Norman Robertsons (Dean Acheson’s “arm-flapping moralists”) and their American appreciators, such as pundits Walter Lippmann and Scotty Reston of The New York Times, shared a fluid combination of idealism, toughness, and naïveté. Pearson had a limited aptitude for exercising authority, diluted by an excessive rationalization of compromise, but, gripping the controls and holding on grimly, he piloted the country through heavy turbulence and earned its gratitude. He lived on for four years and died at the end of 1972, aged seventy-five, and was buried near his external affairs friends Hume Wrong and Norman Robertson at Saint-Pierre-de-Wakefield in the scenic Gatineau Hills of Quebec, near Ottawa.
The country settled happily into a new regime during the summer, but on September 28, 1968, a few hours before opening the magnificent Manic 5 hydroelectric dam on the Manicouagan River – a mile long and 660 feet high at the top of its graceful vaulted arches, one of the great symbols of the new Quebec – Daniel Johnson died. He was fifty-three, and his demise continued the scourge of Union Nationale leaders who died in office, precedented by Duplessis and Paul Sauvé. (Manic 5 was renamed the Daniel Johnson Dam.) Daniel Johnson had been an outstanding premier who showed great promise. Jean-Jacques Bertrand, the vice premier and minister of education and of justice, an elegant, sensible, and well-respected but not a galvanizing man, succeeded him, but he was not sufficiently agile to fight off René Lévesque from the nationalist bloc that his party had held since Duplessis founded it in 1935. Johnson had pledged the formula of every schoolchild “being able to participate fully in Quebec life” by learning French but with parents having the choice between French and English as the language of instruction. Bertrand promised to enact this formula. With the death of Johnson, the nationalist torch, which had been carried by the right under Bourassa, Duplessis, and Johnson, passed now to the left and Lévesque. The Union Nationale was likely to come apart, and a separatist party was probably going to emerge as the alternative governing party to the Liberals. The Roman Catholic Church was in full retreat as a social influence. Contraception cut down the French-Canadian birth rate, and the stylishly miniskirted young
women of Quebec and their highly motivated suitors enjoyed themselves with no less abandon than the rest of the youth of the West. There was little that was conservative or defensive left socially or politically in the zeitgeist of contemporary Quebec.
The departure of Lévesque from the Liberals and of Léger, Quebec’s greatest ecclesiastic from Quebec, and the death of Johnson put the province and the country in uncharted waters. Trudeau and Maurice Couve de Murville had quite a cordial conversation at the Citadelle of Quebec following Johnson’s funeral, where Couve represented the French president. He was now de Gaulle’s prime minister, following the tumultuous events in France in the previous May, when de Gaulle put down a prolonged general strike by waiting until the French bourgeoisie instinctively became frightened at the prospect of actually suffering economic loss and he then called for new elections, threatening to use the army if there was any attempt to prevent them from taking place. (At the climax, on May 30, a crowd of half a million marched up the Champs-Élysées shouting that de Gaulle must go. He spoke for five minutes, calling the election and leaving no doubt that he would not yield other than democratically, and three-quarters of a million marched back down the Champs-Élysées demanding he remain, doubtless including a large contingent of the earlier crowd.) De Gaulle won a crushing victory at the polls, declaring himself to be the “real revolutionary,” for, among other attainments, “beginning the liberation of the French of Canada.” His triumph over the communists and anarchists was a vital victory for the whole West, as the United States was terribly distracted by the endless guerrilla war in Vietnam. It was in some respects de Gaulle’s greatest victory of all, but he was clearly slightly delusional to present such moonshine as his antics in Quebec as indicative of his revolutionary credentials. These credentials were genuine, impressive, and positive, but they were based on his foresight in advocating air and mechanized warfare in the 1930s, his intrepid resistance to the Nazis in the Second World War, and his creation of the Fifth Republic; they had nothing to do with Canada. Quebec was fleetingly noticed in the world, and the flamboyant Trudeau got more international attention than had any previous Canadian politician. Under unprecedented internal pressure, Canada was coming out of itself. The contest between Trudeau and Lévesque promised to be intense. All knew the future of the country was at stake.
3. Trudeau’s First Term and the October Crisis and Its Aftermath, 1968–1973
For a time, it was serene. Trudeau enjoyed a honeymoon, and his elegant and stylish confidence and perfect bilingualism conveyed to English Canada the impression that all would now be in the safe hands of a leader who knew Quebec well and had apparently determined to give Quebec what it wanted without denuding federalism, and had even got Quebec to vote for him against Stanfield’s incomprehensible incantations about “two nations.” Quebec itself was being led, unprovokingly, by Jean-Jacques Bertrand, publicly a good deal more unambiguously federalist than Johnson. Trudeau journeyed to Washington in April 1969 for the funeral of General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had no connection with Eisenhower, a figure of a bygone era; he went (as he acknowledged to the author some years later) to make the acquaintance, in neutral territory, of Charles de Gaulle, who came to honour his wartime comrade and the commander of the armies of France’s liberation. They did not get much beyond a handshake, but it didn’t matter, because a few weeks later, in the most improbable end imaginable to his astounding career, Charles de Gaulle abruptly resigned and returned to his home in eastern France after his government narrowly lost a referendum on an obscure question of regional government and university organization. It was the general’s effort to address the current demand for participatory democracy, but the country was tired of his threats to resign if at any point he was not sustained on every issue. It was a ludicrous ending to a brilliant career, but his departure made matters slightly easier for Canada, as his successor, former prime minister Georges Pompidou, had no interest in stirring matters up in Quebec and had no grievance with the “Anglo-Saxons” generally. De Gaulle died at his home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in November 1970, two weeks short of his eightieth birthday, while reaching for the television listings, and his wife moved to a convent, carrying her belongings in one suitcase. Pompidou announced to the world: “General de Gaulle is dead; France is a widow.” There were huge silent demonstrations of respect in his memory throughout France, and virtually every prominent leader in the world – including the presidents of the United States (now Richard Nixon) and the Soviet Union and the Duke of Edinburgh and five British prime ministers attended a memorial service in Notre-Dame – but no one prominent from Canada or Quebec. De Gaulle banned everyone except family, friends, neighbours, the aldermen of Colombey, and comrades of Free France and the Resistance from attending his funeral in his parish church. He was the last of the great leaders of the Second World War, and his time had predeceased him. Fortunately, he had not brought his presidential memoirs up to 1967, but his recollection in print of his 1960 visit to Canada was irritating enough reading to a Canadian federalist.
From the start, Trudeau pushed a more ambitious and costly social policy, regional economic equality, and – an emphasis he had already made in Pearson’s last Federal-Provincial Conference – individual liberties taking precedence over arguments about jurisdiction. He was advocating what amounted to a residual powers clause that attributed unallocated powers to the people and ring-fenced the individual against government intrusions, and his first step in doing so had been in his revisions to the Criminal Code emancipating homosexuals from legal repression. As he had also promised, he pushed an equal official status for both languages and genuine official biculturalism in federal government services and in federal television and broadcasting throughout the country. He was from the start rather nationalistic by Canadian standards, and he set out to rally Canadians to a more assertive and independent position and to debunk the cant of Quebec nationalists that Canada was merely an excrescence of the Anglo-Americans, a bit of flimsy, pseudo-national scaffolding to anesthetize Quebec while continuing to languish as a satellite of the masters in Washington and London.
It was never clear to what extent Trudeau was acting on his rationalist, though Roman Catholic, faith in the perfectibility of man and the rule of enlightened authority, and to what extent he was invoking intellectually presentable, or at least defensible, positions in support of what was soon identifiable as an onslaught on every material and philosophical front against separatism. The distinction is, in any case, academic, or at least should be confined to another book, one focused directly on Trudeau and the composition of Trudeau’s views. For whatever combination of belief and tactical selection, he replaced the Pearsonian flexibility on concurrent jurisdictions and federal-provincial coexistence with a stone wall: the federal government would cede no powers and accept no special or different status for Quebec or any other province. His predecessor had barely sauntered off into the sunset, hands in his pockets and the Liberal Party’s presented puppy wagging its tail behind him, before it became clear to all that Canadian federalism was personified now by a new man with a policy and nature that had never been seen before in the country’s leading political office. The Quebec nationalists had always seen federalism as led by English-Canadian manoeuvrers like Macdonald and King, or by French Canadians dazzled and acculturated by the English-speaking world, such as Laurier, Lapointe, and St. Laurent, or even indifferent English gentlemen like Borden, or conciliatory, somewhat weak men like Pearson, but never had they seen or dreamt of someone who would stand arms akimbo on top of the constitutional mound and tell them in impeccable French that they were fools and charlatans and that he would crush them and would enjoy doing it. Because Bertrand was not a confrontational leader of the province, and Lesage, who often was, announced his retirement as Quebec Liberal leader in 1969 – to be replaced by the thirty-six-year-old technocrat Robert Bourassa, who was not of a nature, nor in any position, to become too demonstrative – Trudeau’s new era was
not much contested for a time. René Lévesque was just founding his party and only had a couple of members, including himself, in the National Assembly of Quebec, as Bertrand renamed the Legislative Assembly.
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In the early months of his government, Trudeau didn’t do anything that caught the public’s imagination or justified the high expectations of him for new government. There was a good deal of the self-important sloganeering and imposed ambiance of change and modernization that starkly new regimes almost always exude. A great many new senior civil servants were attracted, a great many of them French, and portentous new titles, many borrowed from the unique grandiosity of French statism, were bandied about. There was a lot of official talk of “participation” and scientific government with efficiency criteria rigorously applied, but it was all posturing and nonsense, even if reasonably earnest, at least at first, and nothing of consequence came of it. But silently Trudeau was stoking up the regional and social economic transfers, which in practice was a trickle of benefits to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and the Atlantic provinces, but a torrent of money into Quebec from Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. It was vote-buying on a mighty scale, but not old-fashioned patronage (“unusually large post offices in remote Quebec centres,” as Jack Pickersgill once answered the author’s question about how to sustain a Liberal minority government – he was referring to arrangements with the Créditistes).