by John English
Although the absence of ideology based on religion is striking here, Trudeau found grounds for his argument in a passage from Saint Paul that held that each human being was justified in obeying his own conscience. The study of Cardinal Newman had left a clear mark, as had Emmanuel Mounier and the French personalists, who stressed the role of lay Catholics as opposed to the clergy. In this case, diverse streams met and formed a stronger current in Trudeau in the wake of his travels, one that began to swell after he returned to Quebec and confronted the conservative government of Maurice Duplessis. Although he had become liberal, however, he was certainly not a Canadian Liberal—he believed the party had, among other sins, too poorly defended the rights of minorities.
In his letter to his mother from Siam, Trudeau’s comments on the absence of “domination by an imperialistic power” are significant, particularly because they illuminate his detestation of colonial rule and minority intimidation. The result of colonial imperialism was, he claimed, “hate, suspicion, envy, and arrogance,” all the product of the “inferiority complex of colonies, or former ones.” Colonialism breeds suspicion and envy, qualities that are fundamentally destructive. From his travels and studies, Trudeau adapted this lesson to Canadian circumstances, as he and others began to draw parallels between the sullen anger of the Indians and the Indochinese emerging from colonial rule and the resentments of French Canadians. The killing of millions in the break-up of India, some of which he witnessed at close range, had an impact. Separation had brought massive bloodshed, and a federal solution was obviously the better alternative. Trudeau’s fascination with the emergence of former colonies remained in his later writings. It was also reflected in his approach to international politics after he became prime minister, when he regarded the end of the colonial empires and the establishment of new states as the most significant historical event of the second half of the twentieth century.
Most of the world Trudeau saw on his travels was poor beyond his expectations. His decision to strip himself of worldly goods on his trip derived only in part from asceticism; it also reflected a rich man’s attempt to enter into the life around him in all its facets. Like George Orwell’s ventures into the world of the down and out, Trudeau linked his experiences with his education, which both in Paris and in London had awakened him to egalitarian philosophies. In postwar France, he gravitated naturally towards the socialist left and, like Emmanuel Mounier, recognized that Communism’s greatest appeal came from its assertion of economic equality. His proposed thesis was based on the premise that the egalitarian character of Communism found echoes in the papal encyclicals that had long deplored the great material inequalities in modern industrial capitalism.
In Britain he encountered Laski, a controversial figure because of his defence of the Soviet system as one that attempted to create the economic equality he believed was the foundation of true democracy. Laski struggled both with Stalinism and with the obvious strengths and attractions of postwar American democracy. He prompted Trudeau to look at federalism, a subject Laski had long studied as a means of finding a balance between minority interests and an active central state that would be the strongest force in achieving the economic justice he regarded as essential. When he left London, Trudeau told a Harvard friend, he was “more and more preoccupied with problems of authority, obedience, the foundations of law etc.” Harold Laski had left his mark.69
So had politics in Britain, where the Labour Party was creating a modern welfare state—something yet to take form in Canada. The importance of the trade-union movement in the Labour Party and, in a broader sense, in drawing workers into politics affected Trudeau’s perception of how change might occur in Quebec. No doubt recalling the workers in the Abitibi gold mines with whom he had shared so little in 1946, he determined to focus more closely on what trade unions did. He began to see the trade-union movement as a highly effective method of expressing the workers’ voice in politics. It was, he wrote in 1948, “the duty of all to participate in the body politic and to express one’s conscience in guarding the common good and in all things to bear full witness to the truth.”70 The Welsh labour politician Aneurin Bevan, whom Trudeau came to admire during his year in Britain, would have strongly agreed.
Wearing a thin beard, Trudeau returned to Montreal in May 1949 with traces of the intense Middle Eastern and Asian sun on his hardened and lean body. He had acquired a broad knowledge of international politics and, through his education, of contemporary political economy. That knowledge formed the basis for political views that had become more secular, liberal, and egalitarian, and that coexisted with a renewed yet different Roman Catholic faith. He was less interested in nationalism and, indeed, in history and more concerned with what he was beginning to describe as “effective” and “rational” approaches to politics. He had, most definitely, grown up in respect to his “pedagogy” and his social and political views, although there remained an unpredictability and elusiveness about him.
And had he matured emotionally? He had outgrown the sophomoric hyperbole that he displayed in his major essay for the despised William Yandell Elliott at Harvard. His encounter with Freudian psychiatry seemed to be helpful in clarifying his adolescent fears about women and sex and in fortifying his belief in the importance of individualism. Freudian terms pervaded his prose over the next few years; and, although there is no definite evidence, it appears that the restraints on sex outside of marriage disappeared for Trudeau. Freud, personalism, and probably impatience apparently combined to do the trick. However, other restraints were accepted. The cascade of emotionalism and the regular outbursts of anger that had marked Trudeau in the early forties and, indeed, in his letters to Thérèse Gouin were tempered. Although he became a superb polemicist, his pen accepted limits, ones that eliminated the anti-American rants while at Harvard or the anti-English tirades whenever he had encountered the Union Jack. In fact, soon after his return he wrote a letter to the editor of Le Devoir, Gérard Filion, in which he dismissed Filion’s call for a republican “social” movement. Republicanism, Trudeau declared, would be a waste of scarce political time; the “social” revolution must come first.71
Trudeau had changed; but, despite his claims that, in Quebec, “nothing had changed,” it had, in fact, altered a lot.* He recognized that change on May 19, when he bought a painting by Paul-Émile Borduas for $200.72 In August 1948 Borduas, then an instructor at the École du meuble, wrote a scathing indictment of Quebec society and its major institutions, Refus global, which he and fifteen other younger artists signed. Decades later, its anger still erupts from the page as Borduas attacks a society where feelings were “shamefully smothered and repressed by the most wretched among us.” The past could no longer beat down the present and the future: “To hell with Church blessings and parochial life! They have been repaid a hundredfold for what they originally granted.” Now was the moment for magic, for love, for passionate action, and a world where “the ways of society must be abandoned once and for all.”73 Borduas set off a firestorm of criticism for his negativism and his tone. He lost his job and left Quebec within a few years, but the artist who had begun as a church painter had signalled the fundamental changes in Quebec society that were taking place. So had Trudeau, by his purchase of a Borduas canvas.
Gérard Pelletier did not approve of Borduas’s statement. Returning to Quebec to become a journalist at Le Devoir, he condemned the document as adolescent, adding that “Mr. Borduas is not a young man. This is a mature man.”74 Yet Pelletier, too, was caught up in the sudden changes in Quebec society, and, when Trudeau sought out his old friend shortly after his return, Pelletier persuaded him to join the cause of the asbestos workers, who had been on strike since mid-February.
Trudeau had paid little attention to trade unions before his departure from Quebec in 1944, even though Thérèse’s father was the author of the major text on labour law in Quebec. Now, however, he was interested in the potential of trade unionism to effect political and economic change and,
even before his return, he had contacted Canadian Labour Congress officials about a possible job with them in Ottawa. Nothing eventuated, so, still uncertain of his own future, he quickly accepted Gérard Pelletier’s invitation to join him in the Asbestos Strike, in the town of Asbestos, in the Eastern Townships.
This strike is a fabled moment in Quebec history because it illuminates the class and ethnic differences that fuelled the resentment and dissent in the province. The companies were overwhelmingly foreign-owned, and the managers spoke only English. The miners simply took the asbestos from the ground, loaded it on freight cars, and shipped it away. Less than 5 percent was processed in Canada. On the great rolling hills of the Eastern Townships where it was extracted, large gaping holes remained as testimony to their work. Although the postwar boom benefited the industry, and workers’ wages rose, they knew the rewards went mainly to the foreign owners and the English-speaking managers. Gradually, too, the miners became aware that the material they extracted daily was destroying their lungs. All this knowledge gave force to the strike that exploded when Jean Marchand, the secretary-treasurer of the Confédération des travailleurs Catholiques du Canada (CTCC or Canadian Catholic Confederation of Labour), first met with the workers about their grievances in February 1949. Spontaneously, the workers in their caps took to the streets, along with Marchand in his beret. The strike was illegal, passionate, and immediately controversial.
Trudeau and Pelletier set out to drive from Montreal to the strike sites in Pelletier’s decrepit British-made Singer. Along the way, the police stopped this suspicious-looking vehicle and took both occupants to the police station for questioning. When the officer asked Trudeau, who had been sitting in the left front seat, for his licence, he replied, defiantly, “I have none,” even though he had it in his pocket. The police were set to arrest him when Pelletier, in his typically calm fashion, asked the officers to come to the car. There they saw that the Singer’s controls were on the right, in the British fashion. After an exchange of barbed words, the police resentfully let them go.
Once they arrived at Asbestos, Trudeau met Jean Marchand, a social scientist who had become a brilliant labour organizer in the fashion of the American Walter Reuther. Personally striking, with an uncontrollable thatch of dark hair and a voice that easily reached the back of union halls, Marchand was an impassioned orator who moved to action the men (and the few women) who came to hear him talk. Four decades later, Trudeau’s boyhood friend Pierre Vadeboncoeur recalled Marchand in those days. “He had qualities that were truly exceptional,” he said: “a lively intelligence, sure judgement, a critical spirit, a passionate temperament, obvious sincerity, combined with the extraordinary eloquence of a popular champion that one encounters only two or three times in a century in a single country.”75
Trudeau’s role in the strike was minor. He marched with the strikers, who called him Saint Joseph because of the oriental headgear, North American shorts, and straggly dark beard he still wore. But he made his mark when he gave a fiery speech attacking the Quebec police to five thousand miners. Jacques Hébert thought he spoke emotionally and well about the importance “of democracy, justice, and liberty in language they understood,”76 but Marchand, more experienced with crowds, had a different take on the event. “Miners are not schoolchildren,” he warned, “and while students might steal pencils, the miners steal dynamite. I had managed to defuse two or three cute little plots by the boys which would have blown up the mine manager and most of his staff. So you can imagine that when Trudeau urged physical resistance by the strikers, I got a little worried.” All calmed down, but Marchand had discovered a valuable new colleague, and Trudeau had discovered where he belonged.77
At Asbestos, Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand bonded together—and they stayed together for the rest of their lives. They seemed to understand their mutual strengths, interests, and beliefs. Jean Marchand was the organizer, who travelled the highways and backroads of Quebec and became one of the workers’ own. He slept in their bedrooms and spoke in their church basements, where he thrilled them as his emotions boiled on the tip of his tongue. He never had notes, but his thoughts suddenly exploded into the air. Sometimes, he would break into song, as he did in an Asbestos café one evening with “Les lumières de ma ville,” a ballad made famous that year by the young Quebec chanteuse Monique Leyrac in the film of the same name.78 Gérard Pelletier was not a singer or even much of an orator, but he listened well, as the finest journalists do. He quickly provided stories for the press that helped to make Marchand’s case in the dailies.
Initially, Pierre Trudeau struck both Pelletier and Marchand as different but also remarkable, a man who brought the intellectual depth and international experience that Quebec labour badly needed in the forties. Pelletier’s father was a stationmaster, Marchand’s a worker, while Trudeau’s had been a millionaire businessman. Both Pelletier and Marchand had developed a contempt for the sons of Brébeuf and Outremont, with their “smart” clothes and special banter, but when they saw Trudeau speak directly to the workers about justice and democracy in ways that the workers listened to and understood, they realized he possessed the gifts and commitment they needed. As Pelletier remarked later, Trudeau “made no show either of his money or his muscles. Nor of his intelligence. But despite a strange shyness that [would] never leave him, and which made him less than talkative on first acquaintance, he aroused one’s curiosity.”79 Beginning at Asbestos, Trudeau began to link the world of Christian personalism he had discovered in Paris, and the socialism he had encountered in Laski’s classrooms, with the needs of the Quebec working class. The workers became for him the best hope in a Quebec that had disappointed him on his return.
What Trudeau found there was, in his later words, “a Quebec I did not really know, that of workers exploited by management, denounced by government, clubbed by police, and yet burning with fervent militancy.” It was, in many ways, a new Quebec, a fact he recognized in his finest publication—the introduction and conclusion to a 1956 book he edited on the strike. Although there had been other strikes, he wrote, the Asbestos Strike “was significant because it occurred at a time when we were witnessing the passing of a world, precisely at a moment when our social framework—the worm-eaten remnants of a bygone age—were ready to come apart.”80
Trudeau did not forget the smoke-filled union halls or the workers in checked flannel shirts, their faces lined from years of hard and unhealthy work. After he went back to Montreal, he took on their case against the provincial government and the police, who had broken into workers’ homes, falsely imprisoned many of them, and generally intimidated their towns and villages. He did not charge his clients a penny.81
But the strike was illegal and the workers were violent, destroying the property of the “scabs” who replaced them. The Duplessis government opposed the strikers on the legitimate basis of illegality, but it went much too far, breaking its own laws with impunity. The Catholic Church was divided on the strike, with parish priests rallying to their parishioners while most of the hierarchy backed the government—as they normally did. There were, however, notable exceptions: Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal strongly supported the strikers’ cause, and dozens of truckloads of food went from working-class Montreal parishes to feed the miners’ families. Charbonneau’s vigorous support of the strike became a principal factor in Duplessis’s decision to have “a showdown with elements of the Church that he considered were subverting his authority and working iniquity with his constituents.”82 With prodding from conservative elements of the church and from the government of Quebec, the Vatican persuaded Charbonneau to resign his archbishopric on the grounds of “ill health,” and he spent the rest of his life in Victoria, British Columbia. Pelletier realized that he and the others who had supported the strikers so vociferously had also become “marked men.” Trudeau could no longer get a university job. Jean Marchand therefore offered him a position with the labour movement in Quebec, where he could continue to fight Duplessis
.
But, in one of the surprising moves that mark Trudeau’s life, he left Quebec just when, in his own words, the strike brought “a turning point in the entire religious, political, social, and economic history of the Province of Quebec.”83 To the shock of Pelletier and other friends, Pierre Trudeau departed for Ottawa and became a civil servant.
* Priestley was second only to Churchill in his influence on the BBC in wartime. His broadcasts appealed enormously to the British working class. Trudeau told Thérèse that her father would not approve of Priestley’s socialism.
* Thérèse became one of Canada’s best-known psychologists, the author of several important works on the psychology of children, and an interpreter of the experimental psychology of Jean Piaget. An outstanding researcher and academic, she became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1977 and served as president of several psychology associations.
* The Toronto conference of young leaders that Trudeau, Claude Ryan, and others attended in August 1947 indicates that most Canadian young people were conservative in their personal behaviour. The meeting discussed a poll taken in 1945 of 57 Catholics, 56 of whom went to church every week. They were all opposed to gambling; 40 were opposed to drinking; and only 26 were supportive of “kisses and caresses” between unmarried men and women. All said they were opposed to going further than kisses and caresses—a frontier Trudeau was soon to cross. TP, vol. 8, file 16.