Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  On the face of it, Trudeau had been defeated, but his was still the largest party in votes and MPs, and he was not the sort of person to conclude over-hastily that he had been rejected. After a few days’ suspense (during which President Richard Nixon was re-elected by the greatest plurality in American history, over eighteen million votes), Trudeau determined to meet the House. It was not 1957, it was 1925, and Trudeau proved impressively swift on the uptake in determining how to move from being the idol of yesteryear to the scrambler of the moment. Stanfield, a craggy, principled, and rather guileless man, facilitated Trudeau’s adaptation of Mackenzie King the survivor, and even somewhat resembled John Bracken, though Stanfield was considerably more effective. Trudeau’s public position was that the people had expressed dissatisfaction with aspects of the government, which he would change, but that he still had more support than anyone else. He announced in advance that the government would only consider itself obliged to resign if it lost a designated confidence vote and he set out to assure himself of the support of the NDP. Stanfield would qualify as a Red Tory, but he was not going to win a foot race to the left with the former long-time CCF-NDP supporter Pierre Trudeau. This was where the country stood when Parliament met in January 1973.

  4. The Renovated Pierre Trudeau, 1973–1977

  Even before Parliament met, Trudeau had had the grace of post-electoral conversion that comes from intimations of political mortality. He announced a reduction in immigration, an area where there were hints of backlash, a crackdown on slackers who weren’t really trying to find work while claiming benefits, and an end to family allowances to people whose incomes were above a certain floor. The deadline for twenty-five thousand civil servants to become bilingual would also be extended (in practice, becoming bilingual meant unilingual English-speakers acquiring a working knowledge of French, a serious challenge for most people and a heavy burden to place on their career prospects, and so regarded by many voters). Trudeau’s Throne Speech on January 4, 1973, affected a partial humility that he deployed for a time, promising to “correct those areas in our administration where we had been incompetent, or where we had appeared to be incompetent … without in any way turning our back on our Liberal principles,” and so on.13 In particular, there was the sacred Liberal principle, chiselled in stone by Mackenzie King, to cling to office. As Trudeau said to an interviewer, “I’m that particular type of person who doesn’t like being kicked out.”14

  A new Trudeau swiftly emerged: chastened, but also determined not to be misunderstood as arrogant or detached when he was really concerned with the long-term view. Keith Davey, the chief organizer the Liberals could never dispense with for long, was summoned back. In Liberal mythology, rednecks and an anti-French backlash were blamed for the poor election result, but Trudeau quickly transformed this to an update of the Liberal claim since Laurier’s time that only the Liberals could hold the country together. He read in Parliament a Vancouver editorial that was rather blatantly anti-French, and when the House responded in uproar, as he had hoped, he played it like a violin: They do not react when I criticize separatism in Quebec, to the point of imposing martial law and suppressing seditious activity; why do they object when I urge reciprocal respect for both official languages? The subtext was clear: only Trudeau could keep Quebec in Canada and he would not apologize for saving the country. To the bonne ententistes, he was the personification of the concept; to the federalists who wanted to sleep at night secure that Canada would be there in the morning, he could be entrusted with that sacred cause; and to the French Canadians, he would end the attempted assimilation of the French outside Quebec, had spread the French fact throughout the country, and had opened the federalist wallet in Quebec while Québécois ruled in Ottawa. But all sensibilities entertained by adequately numerous blocs of voters would be addressed. He had been insufficiently respectful of the queen – this would be addressed by Her Majesty making two visits to her Realm of Canada in 1973, a first, and Trudeau was her constant companion, as was Margaret Trudeau, whose demure curtsies emphasized Trudeau’s monarchical appreciativeness without the prime minister himself engaging in exaggerated physical deferences. And Margaret, a young mother, highlighted a new, family oriented Trudeau and pulled the positive attention that beautiful young women with ivory skin, Chiclet smiles, dressed tastefully but with exiguous brevity, revealing them to be ample, callipygian, and possessed of well-toned thighs and calves, always receive.

  Also as always, cash was the annealing balm of political renascence: there were 20 per cent spending increases in 1973 and 1974, though Mackasey’s wheeze on behalf of the unemployed was unearthed and he was moved to immigration with instructions to make a public display of being choosier about who was admitted to the country. John Turner became finance minister after the election. His first budget indexed income taxes, stealing outright one of Stanfield’s promises. It was an innovative step that was much emulated in the world; Trudeau and Turner took all the credit for it, and Stanfield’s role was forgotten. Marc Lalonde, Trudeau’s iron-fisted lieutenant for thankless and raw tasks, as health and welfare minister was given two billion dollars for pensioners and parents. The philosopher king had become the bountiful, compassionate cynic, harvesting votes with the electors’ public credit. Trudeau appeased the West with a Western Economic Opportunities Conference, which he chaired in Calgary.

  But international events intruded on the oil industry. Following the Arab–Israeli Yom Kippur War in October 1973, in which President Nixon effectively supplied Israel a new air force in the midst of the conflict, after the Egyptians had successfully crossed the Suez Canal and breached the Bar-Lev Line, and the Israelis under Ariel Sharon had surrounded an Egyptian army in the south, Nixon and Kissinger brokered an important peace that led eventually to a comprehensive settlement between Israel and Egypt. But in the short term it led to an Arab oil embargo, a constriction in the world oil supply, and severe spikes in the price of oil. Trudeau and several of his advisers devised a new energy program that would take complete form only later but started with a single, subsidized national oil price, a national petroleum company to demonstrate that Canada was not just a branch-plant country, and export taxes on oil. In the same philosophical line, he created the Foreign Investment Review Agency to apply the test of “significant benefit” to Canada for the approval of foreign takeovers. It was an innovative program and sensibly nationalistic while avoiding the self-inflicted wounds of Walter Gordon’s initial run at it a decade before. And Trudeau preserved his liberal credentials by extending for five years the suspension of the death penalty, which signalled that it would not be brought back, though public opinion favoured it.

  By mid-1973, polls were showing that most Canadians thought they were dealing with a new and humbler Trudeau. It was a brilliant performance, and Trudeau’s puckish love of farce and imposture were well-served. Soon, he was lampooning the Progressive Conservatives for their disloyalty to the great John Diefenbaker after the reproof of the 1962 election: “The party fell apart.… The leader was being slowly murdered by his ministers.… Thank God that is not the kind of dissent we see in the Liberal Party.” 15 Trudeau had his foibles, but he could more justly have thanked the Almighty for the fact that he had not made such an unutterable shambles of defence policy, nuclear weapons, and alliance obligations as Diefenbaker had. The old chief nodded and smiled benignly at some of Trudeau’s invocations of him. Trudeau accused Stanfield of being “power-hungry” (as if there were ever a political party leader in any country who was not), and even more scurrilously, he accused the NDP of “sham and hypocrisy” as the NDP leader, David Lewis, secretly met with Trudeau’s agile House leader, Allan MacEachen – and as a sop to the NDP, Trudeau brought in an ineffective Food Prices Review Board and an anti-profiteering law that was just window dressing, as nothing would ever fit the definitions in it. There was another tax cut for low- and middle-income earners and federal subsidies for milk and bread to cushion the public from inflation without disco
untenancing the agricultural producers. Lewis was effectively suborned, receiving legislation in exchange for support, and Stanfield was unable to attract public and media attention to the outright cynicism of Trudeau’s vote-buying.

  Trudeau successfully chaired a Commonwealth Conference in Ottawa in the summer of 1973 and had a portentous state visit to China in October, where the leaders of the People’s Republic, including Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, now almost a quarter-century at the head of that immense country and people, received him as a serious figure.

  In Quebec, Robert Bourassa called a snap election in October 1973 to gain approval of a huge hydroelectric power complex he planned for the rivers flowing into James Bay, and the trend of recent elections was maintained. Bourassa’s Liberals jumped from 45.4 per cent of the vote and 72 members of the National Assembly, to 54.6 per cent and 102 members. Polarization continued, as the Union Nationale – now led by Gabriel Loubier, a former scrap metal dealer from Bellechasse and Johnson and Bertrand’s minister of fish and game – was wiped out, with 5 per cent of the vote and no one elected; and the Créditistes – now led by the ineffable Yvon Dupuis, who last appeared in this narrative as a victim of Diefenbaker’s destruction of ill-advised Pearson ministers from Quebec – descended to 10 per cent of the vote and only 2 legislators. But the Parti Québécois, though it lost 1 member of the National Assembly, to hold only 6, jumped from 23 to 30 per cent of the vote. The overtly separatist vote had increased from 9 per cent in 1966, to 23 in 1970, to 30. Bourassa clearly had all the traditional Liberals, all the non-French, and a big chunk of the old Conservatives and the floating vote, but floating votes, by their nature, are unreliable. It was a good result for the federalists, but the Péquistes were happy to be the official Opposition. All three opposition leaders were defeated personally. Loubier and Dupuis would not be heard from again politically, but Lévesque was still rising.

  The federal Conservatives were knocked off stride by the division in their own large caucus when Trudeau, for tactical purposes opposite the Quebec nationalists and the Conservative Western rednecks, reintroduced for renewed ratification, quite unnecessarily, the principles of official bilingualism. Diefenbaker and sixteen others broke official ranks, and in the disorder, Stanfield – in another fatal blunder for which the Canadian federal Conservatives were conspicuously well-known, from conscription in 1917 through all the clangorous misjudgments of Meighen, Bennett, Manion, Bracken, Drew, and Diefenbaker, and for another decade yet – declared that, if elected, his government would freeze wages and prices. Davey’s polling showed that concern for national unity had subsided and that the country was very preoccupied by inflation, which was approaching 8 per cent in the aftermath of the oil price spike in early 1974. Trudeau was goading Stanfield and Lewis to bring down his government, as his polls showed him the pre-eminent figure in the regard of the country, and he was promising strong action against inflation, starting with his oil and energy program, and was soon frightening the country with hair-raising invocations of what Stanfield’s wage and price freeze would do to it. Trudeau accused the NDP of “hanging on to us like seagulls on a fishing vessel, claiming that they are really steering the ship.” 16 In May 1974, Turner, proving very competent as finance minister, produced a budget that continued the government’s official generosity but ignored some specific demands of the NDP. Since 1867, elected minority governments had only twice been defeated in confidence votes: the Meighen-Byng bungling of the 1925 to 1926 Parliament (Chapter 6), and Diefenbaker’s fumbling his government in the defence debacle of 1963 (Chapter 8). This was different: in the highest (or lowest, depending on one’s perspective) tradition of Kingsian Liberalism, Trudeau, Davey, and the Liberal inner circle had baited a trap, and Stanfield and Lewis took the bait and defeated the government.

  The election was on July 8. Trudeau campaigned with great energy as the wronged incumbent who wished to remain on the job and was the victim of opposition opportunism. “Zap, you’re frozen!” was his answer to Stanfield’s wage and price freeze. He would control energy prices with a nationalistic but not socialistic response, would control food prices with subsidies, and jawbone with labour and industry. He would lead, the country would be reasonable, and he would deal with it, as, it was implied, he had dealt with the shenanigans in Quebec. The other parties never got untracked, couldn’t get off their back feet, and were not plausible alternatives. The whole, swift regeneration of his standing was Trudeau’s third great achievement, next to taking control of the great Liberal governing party in the first place – less than three years after he had been an underemployed rich playboy NDP quasi-academic – and his authoritative handling of the October Crisis, but the greatest achievements were yet to come. On July 8, 1974, Canada elected (1972 results in brackets):141 Liberals with 43.2 per cent of the popular vote (109 MPs and 38.4 per cent); 95 Progressive Conservatives with 35.5 per cent (107 MPs and 35 per cent); 16 NDP with 15.4 per cent (31 MPs and 18 per cent); and 11 Créditistes with 5.1 per cent (15 MPs and 7.6 per cent). Leonard Jones, the former mayor of Moncton, New Brunswick, was elected as an independent; Stanfield had refused to endorse him because of his opposition to official bilingualism (although Moncton has a large French population).*

  At this great watershed in his career, Trudeau went into one of his inexplicable torpors and determined to govern quietly, clear up a backlog, consult his ministers, whom he could not have imagined would be a very fecund source of innovative suggestions, and observe his compatriots in contemplative mode. As always for people in roles where activity is expected, this was a serious tactical error. In Quebec, Bourassa had taken advantage of his sweeping victory to try to move his government to a more nationalistic stance to head off the rise of the Parti Québécois. There was a good deal of agitation in Quebec that the French-speaking percentage of the population was in decline and that the French language was under threat, if not from the forces of bilingualism, from acculturation, erosion, and the post-Catholic birth rate. Bourassa to this point had embraced the Johnson-Bertrand formula that all schoolchildren in Quebec would learn to speak French but that the language of instruction would be whichever of the official languages the parents chose. He now presented, through his education minister, Dr. François Cloutier, a former television psychiatrist, Bill 22, which declared French to be the sole official language of Quebec, and determined that the English-language section of the public education system would be accessible only to the children of those parents who already lived in Quebec when the child was born. Immigrants to Quebec would be subject to language aptitude tests, at preschool ages, to determine, according to arbitrary criteria, where they would go to school. Commercial signs would have to be either in both languages, with the French characters larger than those in any other language, or, in stores, in French only, and these matters were to be enforced by the Office de la Langue Française. This gave rise to the so-called language police, who in time became one of Quebec’s greatest tourist attractions.

  This severely embittered the non-French Quebeckers, a fifth of the population, and more than a fifth in terms of economic activity, who had given all they had for the Liberal Party, provincially and federally. Trudeau and his federal Liberal MPs completely ignored the issue. C.M. (“Bud”) Drury, the senior English federal minister from Montreal, who lived in Ottawa and no longer had a home in Quebec, breezily referred to “the celebrated” Bill 22. Drury was unilingual but, though a capable minister, who defeated Arthur Meighen’s very able (and bilingual) grandson Michael Meighen in Westmount in 1972 and 1974, could not bring himself to utter a single word in support of the English-speaking majority of his constituents from across the Ottawa River. It was exquisitely ironic in a way: Bourassa, the unfrightening technocrat parachuted into the Liberal leadership by Trudeau, after all his leader’s histrionics about individual rights, produced the most egregious official oppression of freedom of expression in Canadian history, throwing acid in the face of the most unquestioning constituency the Liberals had.
What was intended as an act of opportunism would prove an act of suicide. The only way to deal with the Quebec nationalists’ last refuge of the necessity to persecute cultural minorities because of the alleged feebleness and decline in numbers of French Quebec was to stand tall and denounce this as the defeatist fraud that it was. Trudeau and Bourassa had just been re-elected, but they were negligently squandering their strength, fragmenting their coalition, feeding the enemy, and reducing their own arguments, which the people had endorsed, to piffle and claptrap. They would reap what they sowed.

  The first year after the July 1974 election victory was wasted. As inflation worsened, the federal government didn’t do anything. John Turner prepared three alternatives: seek consensus, impose the pay and price controls Trudeau had promised to avoid and had ridiculed, or take fiscal and monetary measures, which essentially meant taxing inflationary wage and revenue gains and ensuring an absence of growth in the money supply. The first was rubbish and the face to be put on doing nothing, though market forces would take care of it eventually; controls were bound to cause terrible credibility problems, given the hay made of them in the last election campaign; and the last was at least potentially imaginative. By now, most inflation was of the cost-push variety, largely in heavy wage settlements, which are easier to deal with than internationally driven commodity price increases. Turner had innovated by indexing benefits, and this afforded an opportunity for more innovation. It could have had the effect of controls and been an amorphous, incomprehensible program, such as Nixon had imposed in the United States in August 1971, that at least altered the psychology of the public. And economics is half psychology and half Grade 3 arithmetic. While the government dithered, there were minor errors, including abstention at the United Nations on the issue of whether to hear from the Palestine Liberation Organization. There were no votes in Canada for Yasser Arafat at this point, and no indication that the PLO had relinquished any of its terrorist methods. There were signs, after three elections and seven years of Trudeau and twelve years and five elections with the Liberals, that the country was getting tired of the Liberals, as normally happens with the governing party, and they weren’t helping themselves by showing any sign of renovation.