by Conrad Black
Trudeau had practised law desultorily, and as a professor he gave one lecture a week on civil liberties. His doctoral thesis was uncompleted, not only because he was not overly motivated, much less driven by economic necessity, but because the subject of his thesis, the relationship between communism and Christianity, was a thin topic, derived chiefly from the lethargic doctoral candidate’s wishful fantasies: a sophomore’s conjuration for a graduate’s opus. There has never in fact been much of a communist-Christian relationship to explore, apart from a few Liberation theologians who were later essentially defrocked as heretics by Pope John Paul II. But once again, the erratically bouncing football of Canadian public life – the unpredictable series of shifts and changes that was necessary to turn New France into a quiescent British colony, Upper Canada from a wilderness into a haven for loyal fugitives from the American Revolution, and the string of detrital settlements along the U.S. border into a country, and to hold the country together through a sequence of crises managed by people who intuitively understood how to round up an adequate consensus of French and English opinion – providentially put the right man in as head of the government now. Even Pierre Trudeau’s constitutional policy was doubtful for a federalist: it was needlessly inflexible, and there was no reason to resist any provincial initiative to add a cubit to its stature in areas that were clearly of provincial interest and acknowledged to be shared jurisdictions by Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, and the other founders. Trudeau’s admirers have turned themselves inside out trying to claim the success of his economic policies by normal criteria, and his detractors have been reduced to paroxysmal frustration debunking him by the same criteria. His constitutional changes and foreign policy initiatives have elicited the same intense combat. These controversies have almost all missed the point, which was that the only real purpose of any of it was to conserve the country and confuse or suborn or overpower the separatists, and it is by that criterion that they must be judged. It was horribly extravagant to deluge the ostensibly disadvantaged provinces with transfer payments from the richest parts of the country. The whole constitutional approach based on individual rights above all other things went far beyond its alleged objective, turned the country’s judges into hyperactive social tinkerers, and reduced much of society to over-litigious bedlam. And his truckling to communists and the Third World, his nonsense with the Club of Rome think tank in opposition to economic growth, like the ludicrous North-South fad, scarcely capable of being recalled at all, in which Trudeau invested such dilettantish interest (as most of the rest of us blinked in disbelief), none of any of it amounted to anything except to cut the Quebec separatists off at the knees.
Trudeau showed that the federal government would defend its position, if need be, with martial law, tanks, and dirty tricks; that Canada was a huge material benefit to Quebeckers; that French was a fact throughout the country, however sketchy in most of it. (He told a complainer about bilingual cornflakes boxes to “turn the box around.”) He was a genius in a specialized way that was what the country needed. And his over-respectful attention to Fidel Castro and Soviet puppets like Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania and Erich Honecker of East Germany was inane but it made the point that Canada was not a lackey of Washington, much less London (and was not more inane than the foreign policy perceptions of a large number of French Canadians). Trudeau did not care a rap what Le Devoir, or Radio-Canada, or the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste at the Monument-National on Boulevard Saint-Laurent (with its unilingual Jewish landlord), or all the bien pensants thought of anything. And his pugnacity, his courage, as well as his style – his elegant wardrobe and panache – were admired in Quebec, as they were elsewhere. He was simplistic and even reactionary, but he was a star, was never caught short in debate, and had a bitchy hauteur that was always entertaining and hard not to respect. He was the man of this difficult hour.
The Quebec nationalists like Lévesque had grown from fiery youth to apparent maturity with the notion that the federalist opposition was headed by a composite of the obfuscatory Mackenzie King, the avuncular but detached St. Laurent, the incoherent scourge of hyphenated Canadianism Diefenbaker, and the amiable, accident-prone Pearson, all of them conciliatory to some extent and capable of being gradually moved. Suddenly in their path was a very tough French-Canadian prime minister who was entirely bicultural, had mysteriously developed almost a constitutional religion on the avoidance of further concessions to Quebec, had great flair and enjoyed combat as much as his predecessors had been averse to it, and was prepared to throw all his opponents into prison if they gave him any pretext to do it. (One day, he encountered the half-mad ex-monk and union leader Michel Chartrand in the halls of Parliament, and Chartrand, who had worked with Marchand at the Confédération des Syndicats Nationaux, mocked Trudeau’s security escort. Trudeau replied that he didn’t need any security with Chartrand and would be happy to settle the differences between them right there. Chartrand declined.) This was not the whey-faced deferential Pearsonism the Quebec nationalists had had in mind as le vrai visage of their ancient federalist foe, and Trudeau completely intimidated them.
If Trudeau was unreasonable, and he often was, it must be remembered that his opponents were wolves in sheep’s clothing. They masqueraded as civilized respecters of minority rights and all the democratic niceties, but from their restrictive language laws, which were a long sequence of infringements of freedom of expression, through their confiscatory taxes – designed to push out the non-French, finance their self-directed ministerial largesse, and, in changing Quebec’s demographics by driving out the minorities, compensate for the province’s collapsed birth rate, itself in part a peevish act of rebellion against its priest-ridden past – they were not moderate. There were frequent incitements of ethnic antagonisms, and most of the nationalist leaders were not the grosses batteries they presented themselves as, but rather were seedy and contemptible hypocrites. The independence of Quebec can be advocated in a way that is not culturally or morally offensive, and it certainly has an understandable allure, but so does the flowering of a bilingual Canada. The Quebec nationalists could never accept a contest of competing visions; they would only propagate their own vision on the back of a savage defamation of the alternative. They could never compete fairly and could never admit the cost of what they were proposing; it was always étapisme, step by step, as one of their leaders, Jacques Parizeau, put it, “tearing the Canadian flag inch by inch until it was easier to tear it completely than mend it.” Trudeau, in his sometimes outrageous way, had courage, and he had integrity. Most of his opponents of whom the same can be said were not people of stature in their movement.
Even with Lévesque, it did not take much to elicit a torrent of resentment and vindictiveness, and the further down in the separatist ranks one descended, the harder it was and the less frequently it was attempted to disguise these sentiments behind a pall of elaborate sophistry and prevarication. Trudeau was inflexible, but the separatists were dishonest. Pearson had seen the danger and started to produce his defence, and the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission had recommended in its report in 1969 that English and French be declared formally and in all respects co-equal official languages; that Ontario and New Brunswick become officially bilingual provinces; that bilingual districts be established throughout the country wherever there was a French or English minority of 10 per cent or more of the population; that Ottawa become a bilingual city; and that wherever numbers made it possible, parents should have the right to choose between French and English as the language of instruction of their children (this was the position Daniel Johnson had taken in the last press conference of his life, and which Jean-Jacques Bertrand had entrenched in Quebec in Bill 23, enacted over stormy nationalist protests in 1969). The Royal Commission had found that French Canadians were disproportionately infrequent holders of high positions in the public and private sectors and that their standard of living was lower than that of all other groups except Italian Canadians and native people, though this subst
antially reflected the condition of French minorities outside Quebec. The exceptionally capable justice minister, John Turner, sold the new Official Languages Act (1969) to the provincial premiers with great tact and enacted and implemented it. If St. Laurent had commissioned this analysis and led national opinion as Pearson had – if it had all been done a decade earlier – matters would have been settled. It was at this point that the nationalist establishment of Quebec betrayed its bonne ententiste allies in English Canada.
Always, up to this time, the nationalists of Quebec had said that all they sought was equality with the English. Dr. Philippe Hamel, the leader of the Action Libérale Nationale, which Duplessis had subsumed into his Conservative Party of Quebec to form the Union Nationale in 1935, said, “Conquer us with goodwill, my English friends; you are surely capable of it and you will be astonished by the easy victory that awaits you.”10 All three federal political parties supported the recommendations of the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission, and millions of English-Canadian schoolchildren all over Canada began studying French relatively intensively. It was a powerful shift based altogether on goodwill and the recognition that it was an asset to have both these formidable and vital cultures, in Lord Durham’s phrase, “in the bosom of a single state.” The great Expo 67 in Montreal, a project in whose success Duplessis, Lesage, Johnson, Drapeau, Saulnier, Diefenbaker, and Pearson had all shared, helped create this new mood, so long in coming, which coincided with the decline of the British connection and the American imbroglio in Vietnam and widespread racial conflict there.
At the prospect of this long-sought consummation of centuries of isolation and insecurity of the French Canadians, who had made the compromises Jean Drapeau had so graphically described to Charles de Gaulle to the general approval of the whole country, the nationalists suddenly veered 180 degrees and declared that bilingualism was, unbelievably, a means to the accomplishment of the most hoary and ancient bugbear of all, assimilation. André Laurendeau (former leader of the Bloc Populaire and Henri Bourassa’s chosen successor) and Trudeau, Marchand, Pelletier, and all the promoters of French-English harmony – from Pearson and Davidson Dunton to F.R. Scott (author of the Regina Manifesto, former leader of the Quebec CCF, and dean of law at McGill, who supported imposition of the War Measures Act) – were all, in the minds of the Quebec nationalists, involved in a conspiracy, some doubtless unwittingly, to deracinate the French Canadians and kill them with kindness through the promotion of the notorious evil of bilingualism, for which Quebec had been clamouring for 150 years. English Canada, having been lured to the matrimonial altar and abandoned there, gradually lapsed back into a less sentimental attitude toward its francophone compatriots. Such an abrupt volte-face, such a policy betrayal, did not justify the RCMP’s burning of barns or stealing the Parti Québécois’s membership list, but it did legitimize Pierre Trudeau’s contempt for the treachery and moral bankruptcy of most of his separatist opposition.
These Quebec nationalists do not deserve most of the pelagic deluge of tears that many among the gullible English-Canadian left have shed for them. Trudeau was not only at the head of the forces of pan-Canadianism and national renewal, and of traditional emancipation of the French Canadians, he was the leader of the forces of cultural tolerance, mutual respect, and political good faith. He was right; the separatists were morally wrong in their tactics, even if it were possible to have some sympathy for the desirability of an independent French Quebec, but Trudeau was the high road and the brave chef. Lévesque had some sense of moderation, if not a surplus of integrity, but most of Trudeau’s separatist enemies were weasels and charlatans, and the issue was so quickly polarized, there was for a long time little room in the discussion for well-meaning federal alternatives like Robert Stanfield, or even an ambiguous front man like Robert Bourassa. The young Quebec premier was trying to carve out a nationalist role where retention of participation in Canada was justified almost exclusively on economic grounds, but he was a colourless Quebec Mackenzie King, a technocrat lacking robustness (though he was a very intelligent and charming man personally, and ultimately an important premier). It was coming down to a bare-knuckle fight between Trudeau and Lévesque, and there wasn’t much room in the ring for anyone else, and certainly not for a referee.
In straight legislative terms, one of Trudeau’s most important measures was his Opportunities for Youth program, announced in 1971. By this means, the federal government simply opened a spigot of money for young people for any apparently respectable purpose. His government also raised the old-age pension and guaranteed income supplement and indexed it to the cost of living. There were new amendments to the Criminal Code and related statutes, and there were rather lethargic efforts to upgrade the prison system to emphasize job training and other methods of rehabilitating inmates. He revised unemployment insurance, by increased payments, effectively changing it from insurance against unemployment to an embryonic guaranteed income plan. The labour minister, Bryce Mackasey, had built in a scheme that would be affordable if unemployment did not go above 5 per cent, but it would be increasingly costly if it rose above that point, and the cabinet did not realize at first that it was a time bomb. In the meantime, it was popular with recipients. And there was a more pallid form of tax reform than Pearson’s finance minister, Walter Gordon, had sought, but about a million modest income earners were exonerated from federal income taxes, which were reduced for about 4.7 million people and increased for about 1.3 million higher income earners. It all complimented the regional economic programs in making life more comfortable in the working and rural districts of Quebec and other places, grace au gouvernement federal, and the basic political arithmetic made a nice equation.
Foreign policy initiatives were also designed to make Trudeau appear an independent world figure, and Canada exchanged embassies with the People’s Republic of China before China was admitted to the United Nations or President Nixon made his spectacular visit to Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai in 1972. Trudeau made a state visit to the Soviet Union and extended Canadian territorial waters in the Arctic. But he did not comment on the Vietnam War, as Pearson had, and his relations with President Nixon were not strained. He was impressed by Nixon’s evident knowledge of international affairs and many successes, especially in relations with China and the Soviet Union. Nixon and his chief foreign policy colleague, Dr. Henry Kissinger, considered Trudeau “more intelligent than Canadian leaders usually are, but a rather frivolous personality.”11 On principal issues, both Nixon and Kissinger told the author that Trudeau never bothered them, but Kissinger said they viewed with mild curiosity “his fascination with the lesser communists,” referring largely to Castro. Nixon said Trudeau was “a poseur, but a smart one, and always very agreeable when we met.”12
Unemployment had crept up, as had inflation, when Trudeau announced on September 1, 1972, that there would be an election on October 30. He promised to take the “high road” and have a “dialogue” with the country. The Liberal slogan was “The Land Is Strong,” and it was a bland and self-satisfied campaign. Trudeau frequently campaigned with Margaret, his wife of less than two years, the beautiful daughter of a St. Laurent government minister from Vancouver, James Sinclair. She was twenty-nine years his junior, a flower child, but a campaign plus point. It was almost as if 1957 had never happened, and the Liberal campaign leadership was imbued with the conviction of its invincibility, though in fact the government’s record was undistinguished, apart from Trudeau’s handling of the October Crisis. Stanfield had worked hard to learn French and repair the divisions in the Progressive Conservative Party, and he recruited many good candidates, including the runner-up to Bourassa in the contest to succeed Jean Lesage as Quebec Liberal leader, former judge Claude Wagner. (The late Pierre Laporte had come third, but the contest was largely rigged by Trudeau and Marchand, who wanted Lesage out and were concerned at how independent Wagner would be, though he was an unambiguous federalist.) The Liberals were calling for a return to restrictions on foreign ac
quisitions of Canadian businesses, and the Conservatives were calling for tighter budgeting and even a possibility of wage and price controls to stop inflation. Almost all the government ministers went right through the term and sought re-election. (Only Paul Hellyer and Eric Kierans had retired, mainly because of personality problems with Trudeau.) The results on October 30 were a surprise (1968 results in brackets): the Liberals emerged with 109 MPs and 38.4 per cent of the vote (previously, 155 MPs and 45.4 per cent); Progressive Conservatives, 107 MPs and 35 per cent (72 MPs and 31.4 per cent); NDP, 31 MPs and 18 per cent (22 MPs and 17 per cent); and the Créditistes, 15 MPs and 7.6 per cent (14 MPs and 5.3 per cent). Trudeau had carried 58 out of 75 MPs in Quebec (the only Progressive Conservatives elected were Claude Wagner and Heward Grafftey in voting percentage terms), but he did more poorly in the other provinces combined than Pearson had in the debacle of 1958.