by Conrad Black
On the contrary, John Turner, the logical successor to Trudeau, after a consistently strong showing in successive cabinet positions, abruptly resigned on September 10, and his portfolio was awarded to the capable Donald Stovel Macdonald. Turner was now the Liberal leader in waiting, like Georges Pompidou after the événements of 1968, in, as de Gaulle put it, “la réserve de la République.” On October 13, 1975, at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, Trudeau astonished the country by announcing the imposition of controls on wages and prices. Public reaction was understandably negative, and the government drifted into 1976, its condition rendered less buoyant by Trudeau’s distracted public musings that the economic system “wasn’t working” and that there was need for a “new society.”17 It was back to the pompous idiocy of Trudeau the lazy academic commentator, wallowing in his inheritance and complaining of the shortcomings of the world, and his electors in particular, while he did not do what he was elected to do, and instead did what he promised not to do. When challenged and insulted, Trudeau’s mental and physical agility showed, and the tenor of his voice became sharper and his articulation elegantly hard-hitting. But when Trudeau was not fighting the separatists or for his political life, though always a rewarding conversationalist in person, he tended to be a platitudinous time-warp 1950s leftie, with an irritatingly nasalized and condescending method of self-expression. The country knew his moods well by now, and this was the least attractive one.
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The Progressive Conservatives had a lively leadership convention, starting on February 22, 1976, in Ottawa. The front-runner was Claude Wagner, who had been elected as a Conservative MP for Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, in 1972 and 1974, and had been Jean Lesage’s minister of justice in Quebec, where he was popular as a law-and-order attorney general. As he considered, with some reason, that the leadership had been stolen from him by the Liberal establishment and given to Bourassa in 1970, he accepted reappointment by Jean-Jacques Bertrand to the bench just before Bertrand dissolved the National Assembly for the 1970 provincial election. Lured back to politics as leader of the Progressive Conservatives in Quebec by Stanfield and others, he was a logical choice: as bilingual as Trudeau and a formidable public speaker in both languages. The Conservatives had never had a French-Canadian leader, or even one who could speak French properly, and – apart from the mighty gift of fifty MPs from Maurice Duplessis in 1958 – had not come close to carrying Quebec in a federal election since Sir John Macdonald’s last election, in the all-time heavyweight match of Canadian history, against Wilfrid Laurier in 1891 (Chapter 4).
There was another Quebec candidate: Brian Mulroney, a thirty-six-year-old labour lawyer who had enjoyed extensive publicity for his role on the Cliche Commission, appointed by Bourassa to investigate elements of the Quebec labour movement in 1974. He had been an insider in the thin Quebec ranks of his party for about a decade and had helped to swing a number of Fulton delegates to Stanfield on the last ballot of the 1967 convention. He had helped attract Wagner to the Conservatives in 1972, and though he had never run for elective office, he was a presentable and popular candidate, articulate, bilingual, and a loyal party regular in difficult times. The rationale for choosing a leader who could shake the Liberal stranglehold on Quebec and join usefully in the Quebec discussion, which, though semi-dormant, was clearly going to heat up again, was obvious.
Paul Hellyer, the veteran Liberal minister of the St. Laurent, Pearson, and Trudeau governments, not only crossed the aisle and ran as a candidate for the Progressive Conservative leadership, he chastised the Red Tories in his candidate’s speech to the convention for being too much like the Liberals whose company he had departed. He was the only person in history to be a serious candidate for the leadership of both major political parties. There were a number of other candidates, particularly Red Tories Joe Clark of Alberta and Flora MacDonald of Kingston, Ontario.
The oratorical star, apart from Wagner, was eighty-year-old John Diefenbaker, now in his twelfth consecutive parliamentary term, who delighted and convulsed the convention with his usual witticisms and scurrilous embellishments about the shortcomings of the Liberals, including the claim that Trudeau had said in his visit to Moscow that Canada was militarily afraid of the United States. (Trudeau was fundamentally closer at heart to the Soviet Union than to the United States, a country he never understood well, and he took his sons to the Siberian industrial city of Norilsk and claimed that Soviet planning was a success story, but he was not exactly anti-American and did not say exactly what Diefenbaker imputed to him.) It didn’t really matter; people would forgive Diefenbaker almost anything now, and he was the last person who had led his party to victory since R.B. Bennett in 1930, before many of the delegates and some of the candidates were born.
Wagner led for three ballots, but Mulroney divided the Quebec vote with him. There were reservations about an unelected candidate, and one whose business connections enabled him to run such a rich campaign as Mulroney’s. Wagner had his baggage, and bigotry was part of it. Flora MacDonald withdrew in favour of Clark, and he began moving up as the alternative to the Quebeckers, passing Mulroney on the third ballot to go to a final runoff with Wagner. There was now a distinct lack of rapport between Mulroney and Wagner, and Wagner had prevented Mulroney’s selection even as a delegate, a churlish act that cost him now. Joe Clark (b. 1939) was elected leader of the Opposition, with 1,187 ballots to Wagner’s 1,122. The Progressive Conservatives had chosen an unprepossessing leader, just thirty-six years old, though one who would enjoy considerable attainments. He was an improbable figure to put up against a man of Trudeau’s stature and would not do anything for his party with French Canadians, though his grasp of the language was somewhat better than Stanfield’s. Robert Stanfield had been one of the more distinguished of the long list of unsuccessful leaders of his party; he had made the PCs over as a sensible, well-organized, centrist party with a large and reasonably talented caucus. He was universally respected as an intelligent and honest, but unexciting, man, and was long remembered in Nova Scotia as an outstanding premier. Mulroney would be back, but he declined to run for Parliament at this point. Wagner did not get on well with Clark, though he spoke very graciously at the end of the convention. He accepted appointment to the Senate by Trudeau in 1978 but died of cancer the next year, aged only fifty-four, one of the unusual and meteoric figures of Canadian public affairs, a General Boulanger figure to some (a bold-seeming man who was yet rather hesitant), but a compelling public and private personality. His son, Richard Wagner, was appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 2012.
The Liberals were confident, and their standing in the polls recovered somewhat as inflation weakened, as it was bound to do under the ministrations of Trudeau’s new Anti-Inflation Board. (All these vast agglomerations of controls were more show and fanfare than actual administration. As President Nixon, who had modelled his Pay Board and related parts of the U.S. anti-inflation apparatus on some of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, told the author, “They just baffle and scare people and slow things down. They don’t really do anything, and you can’t keep them for long, any more than FDR did.” Or Nixon, or Trudeau.) The state oil company Petro-Canada was established, the death penalty was abolished, and Trudeau had a moderately successful trip to Latin America, an area Canada had completely ignored, for decades not even acting on repeated requests by the United States and others to join the Organization of American States (OAS), where, it was said, Canada’s chair had been waiting for it since the organization was set up by President Truman in 1948. Trudeau had finally taken Canada into the OAS in 1972.
The country and its government were treading water rather lethargically when Robert Bourassa called an election in Quebec for November 15, 1976, just three years into his current mandate. It was never obvious why he called the election, as there had been a number of scandals that had besmirched the government. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, another achievement of Mayor Jean Drapeau but not efficiently admi
nistered, had hobbled the city and province with an onerous deficit and in its costly aftermath had been almost as deflating to Quebec’s morale as the world’s fair of nine years before had been exhilarating. But Bourassa had not imagined that the Quebec cultural minority could desert the Liberals in serious numbers and did not understand that the Parti Québécois was capable of running as a straight good-government reform party and consign independence to a referendum to be held in due course under firmly democratic principles. It was assumed at first that the government would be re-elected, but by the end of the campaign it was clear that Bourassa was in difficulty. That did not prepare the country for the thunderclap produced by the voters of Quebec on election day. The Liberals collapsed from 55 per cent of the vote three years before to 34 per cent, suffering wholesale desertions of the non-French to the Union Nationale under Rodrigue Biron. In a final appearance in Quebec history, the Union Nationale jumped from 5 to 18.2 per cent of the vote, and the Créditistes faded from 10 per cent in 1973 to 4.6 per cent. The Parti Québécois jumped from 30 per cent in 1973 (up from 23 per cent in 1970) to 41.4 per cent. The 110 places in the National Assembly were divided as follows: PQ, 71 seats (up from 6); Liberals, 26 (down from 102); Union Nationale 11 (having had no seats); and Créditistes, 1 (down from 2). It was not the case that all the Péquiste voters were automatically for the independence of Quebec, and almost all the other party votes could be assumed to be, at this point, anti-separatist, but the PQ had more than quadrupled the ostensibly independentist vote in ten years, and the trajectory was extremely worrisome to federalists.
The tactic of étapisme, gradualism, was clever; Quebec was advancing on independence and secession in almost imperceptible increments. An issue that Canada had assumed was quiescent, if not over, suddenly was spectacularly alive, and while Lévesque spoke soberly on election night, he left no doubt that he would make an all-out drive for a “yes” vote in a referendum in the current term on a question that would lead, however circuitously, to Quebec as an independent and sovereign republic. The nine-hundred-pound gorilla that had been slumbering, albeit sometimes loudly, in the Canadian house since Papineau’s time was on its feet, lurching about, and rearranging furniture noisily and unpredictably. As always when under direct challenge, Trudeau responded strongly. He congratulated Lévesque and made it clear that he looked forward to the debate and considered that the new Quebec government was boxed between a commitment to a referendum and the impossibility of winning a referendum on any question that amounted to a proposition to secede from Canada.
Bourassa was defeated in his own district and was completely discredited. His career was mistakenly assumed to be over.
5. Trudeau, Lévesque, and Clark, 1977–1980
In the spirit of crisis that now obtained in Canada, boredom and annoyance with Trudeau suddenly evaporated and with it the idea of disposing of him to bring in Joe Clark to deal with René Lévesque and his powerful coterie (many of whom spoke English with an educated English accent, such as Jacques Parizeau and Jacques-Yvan Morin; “By Jove!” was one of Parizeau’s frequent openers, even in French). In January 1977, in Quebec City, Trudeau gave one of the greatest speeches of his career, calling for a referendum in Quebec soon and a question that would be clear and resolve matters once and for all. He emphasized that the burden was on those who would dispense with Canada as it had evolved to justify such a radical course, as it was a successful and admired country that had pursued social and cultural justice with success and would persevere to do better. He could not have imagined that Lévesque would respond as he requested. The whole Péquiste tactic was to defer the referendum, putting it behind good government, and in the name of social democracy squeeze the English and Jewish minorities, who had a relatively high standard of living, always in the intellectually impeccable cause of equity and fairness, and ultimately produce an anodyne question that would not frighten the voters but that Lévesque could use to escalate demands to outright independence.
It was going to be a long and intricate process, and as Lévesque had just got to the controls of government, he would have a honeymoon. Trudeau was well past any such indulgence, and some of his bad brainwaves were coming back to haunt him now. He had squandered billions through his friend Jean-Pierre Goyer, minister of supply and services, on a new airport for Montreal near the Ontario border. Premier Bertrand had warned that it was not a good location, and Trudeau publicly said Bertrand was “off his rocker.” It was clear by the late 1970s that Trudeau and Goyer’s airport at Mirabel was a disaster that no one used and from which only the serried ranks of the patronage-fed friends of the federal Liberal Party profited. (It was not without its ironies that Montreal’s traditional airport was eventually named after Trudeau, as Toronto’s, Quebec City’s, and Halifax’s airports were named after, respectively, Pearson, Lesage, and Stanfield.)
Lévesque attended his first Federal-Provincial Conference in many years in mid-December 1976, was greeted coolly but civilly by Trudeau, and the conference droned on as they always do, with much fewer fireworks than when Trudeau and Johnson had crossed swords in 1968. Lévesque told the Economic Club of New York on January 25, 1977, that Quebec’s decision was irreversible and as inevitable as the American Revolution. None of the Americans believed a word of it, and it betrayed Lévesque’s tendency as a journalist to oversimplify and to vulgarize complicated points. This was his strength and his weakness. As editor of a news magazine program in the 1950s in Quebec, he introduced much of French Canada to the world, but everything, no matter how complicated, was packaged up and summarized by him in thirty minutes. And that, essentially, was his vision, the simplistic, impatient, impulsive, and unrigorous reflexes of a journalist, but a very skilful journalist. He combined his talents at condensed reporting with the natural charm and frankness of the corner-store merchant, leaning on the counter beside his cash register and chatting with the neighbours about the events and personalities of the day. He knew the people and was an energetic and persuasive man, personally very considerate, often amusing, and never pompous. He was a bundle of nerves, twitching and smoking constantly, and was a tightly wound spring but never overtly racist. He was one of Quebec’s all-time greatest public leaders, and enjoys with Honoré Mercier and Maurice Duplessis the distinction of being one of the only people who ever founded a Quebec political party and led it to victory, though he did not have the administrative talent or quality of political judgment or personal self-discipline of Duplessis. He was a remarkable man, but not exactly a great man. Trudeau was more worldly and formidable, more confident and intellectually rigorous. Lévesque was all emotion; Trudeau was all reason to a fault, leading him to irrational and sadistic attachments to abstract principles as only French Cartesians or theologians can be, to the point of nonsensical conclusions sometimes. The prophet of fire was contending with the prophet of ice. Napoleon said that “God is on the side of the heavy battalions.” The heavy battalions were with Trudeau, but a gripping contest was developing.
Lévesque was going to defer his referendum and try to prepare the public with normal government, and Trudeau had adopted some techniques, which his federalist successors would follow, that were open to question. Because of the immense scale of transfer payments to Quebec (and tokenistically to the other provinces with below-average income levels), Trudeau and succeeding federal prime ministers have never revealed their full extent, saying, as Trudeau put it, “You can’t put a price tag on Confederation.” The fear was of an English-Canadian backlash, but it allowed the separatist orators and publicists to claim that Quebec was a net loser in Confederation. The people ultimately seemed to know better, but the argument could have been won, and the English Canadians could have accepted that it was a price worth paying. Also, Trudeau did not try to pre-empt Lévesque with his own law requiring a clear referendum question. He knew Lévesque was going to present a vague question and did nothing to make it more difficult for him to do so. Through 1977 and into 1978, Trudeau prepared opinion thro
ughout Canada very calmly and won wide admiration for the conciliatory sobriety and eloquence with which he presented the alternatives. Enthusiasm for official biculturalism rose vertiginously in English Canada; far from recoiling at what might have been perceived as the ingratitude and bellicosity of Quebec, English Canada seemed to have a revelation of its fondness for a bicultural, transcontinental confederation, precisely the grand vision of Macdonald and Laurier, suitably updated.
Trudeau countered Lévesque’s appearance at the Economic Club of New York with a far more successful address to a vastly more important audience: a joint session of the United States Congress, on February 22, 1977. He told the American legislators that the separation of Quebec would be “a crime against the history of mankind,” and his speech was much admired in the United States as well as Canada. Trudeau got on splendidly with President Jimmy Carter. He never liked strong American presidents but was very impressed with Carter’s preoccupation with details and legalities and his reluctance to use America’s great power in any forceful way. He could not fail to be impressed by Nixon’s knowledge of the world and his legendary status as one of the most famous people in the world for decades, but he did not have the relaxed relationship with him that he did with Carter. He had a perfectly civil but only very passing relationship with President Gerald Ford. He would deeply resent Ronald Reagan’s subsequent success, his popularity, and his technique of approaching issues that almost completely ignored Trudeau’s (and Carter’s) laboriously unimaginative micro-inspection. Reagan was a man of the fears of the Great Depression, the dreams fulfilled of Hollywood, the just war, the favours of the rich, and the adulation of the masses of America. Trudeau never understood any of it.