by John English
Trudeau’s journeyings became less frequent and earnest, even though he gave a long radio broadcast on “Techniques du voyage” in which he said he travelled not to bring home tales of three-star restaurants or, like diplomats, of meetings with kings and presidents, but to know humanity in its richness. To do so, he needed to mix with the people, travel light, and abandon airs and luxury—only then did he encounter the saints, the wandering philosophers, poets, and scoundrels who form the human fraternity.39
By the fall of 1952 he realized that his adventures in Palestine and Moscow were richer than his recent experiences in Quebec or in the remainder of Canada. If he was to fulfill his goals for a public life in Canada, he would have to change direction.
So he began to clarify his domestic political program. In personal terms, he identified three specific actions: deeper involvement in the trade-union movement in Quebec; more political activity in Quebec; and interaction with English-Canadian intellectuals who were “waking up” to Quebec and who shared many of his political ideas about civil liberties and the dangers of unbridled capitalism.
Trudeau’s contact with anglophone intellectuals, notably his growing friendship with F.R. Scott, a McGill University law professor, CCF activist, and well-known poet, was undoubtedly a significant factor in his closer identification with liberal democratic thought—especially as it was embodied in the English-Canadian socialist tradition.40 Yet Trudeau was always his own man, deriving his approach to domestic affairs from diverse influences ranging from personalism and Le Monde to Maynard Keynes and Paul Claudel. He reflected these varied streams in his involvement with Cité libre, and, during the fifties, his experience in teaching workers in the mine and mill towns of Quebec also influenced him strongly. As his address to the Couchiching Conference reveals, Trudeau knew and, in many ways, admired the Anglo-Saxon political tradition, but he had profound doubts about the manner in which it had developed in the former British North American colonies.
During his long absences in Europe and in Africa and Asia, Trudeau had remained in contact with his Cité libre colleagues, and he missed those nights where the group came with their wives, girlfriends, and manuscripts to obey, in the words of one of the members, Jean Le Moyne, “no orders of the day but only the disorders of the night.”41 He realized that he must immerse himself more deeply in the life of his city and his province or risk losing the influence his intellect and imagination had gained for him since those first gatherings in Gérard Pelletier’s stone house on Lac des Deux Montagnes. The election of 1952 in Quebec, which he had conspicuously missed, had stirred dissent and opposition to Maurice Duplessis among intellectuals and the professional classes in Montreal. Le Devoir, which had generally supported Duplessis in 1948, had become an opponent of the government by 1952, and it followed the election with ever stronger attacks on the ruling party. One rallying point was the dismissal of the reformist archbishop Joseph Charbonneau in Montreal (who actually controlled some shares of Le Devoir) and his replacement by Paul-Émile Léger. The new archbishop “sought to reassert the influence of the Church on the faithful and to stimulate religious faith while opposing the growing materialism of Montreal.”42 Yet the schools, the hospitals, and the social services that the church had controlled for so long were overwhelmed by the material and spiritual needs of the postwar flood of people to the factories and shops of Montreal, whose metropolitan population grew from 1,139,921 in 1941 to 1,620,758 in 1956. The Catholic urban voice in the Quebec capital was fainter than that of the rural counties where Duplessis’s Union nationale held sway.
Tensions grew. In the fall of 1952 a strike of textile workers at Louiseville had brought police intervention, violence, and bloodshed. Duplessis declared the government response justified, arguing that society rested on two pillars—religious authority and civil authority—which must not erode. A threat to one undermined the other. In the pages of Le Devoir, André Laurendeau had already decided that the government no longer defended the common good and, in the eyes of the workers, had become no more than “the ally of the bosses.” Laurendeau’s niece later recalled that she had the impression that “the Laurendeau living room became the staging ground for the warriors on the left,” gathering their forces to defeat Duplessis.43 The CTCC, the Catholic union, called a meeting just before Christmas, 1952, to discuss a general strike, but it was a confession of weakness rather than strength. The CTCC was only part of organized labour in Quebec, where the Fédération des unions industrielles du Québec (FUIQ) and the Fédération provincial du travail du Québec (FPTQ) competed for membership and authority. Although the CTCC had grown faster than any other union, it lacked the financial support of international unionism that its rivals possessed. That financial weakness was one reason why the CTCC decided not to enter directly into politics.
That December, in Cité libre, Trudeau attacked the decision, claiming that Quebec workers would cleanse the political system and that the old parties offered no prospects of real change.44 On a Radio-Canada broadcast early in the new year he explained his beliefs in more detail. In a democracy, he said, a police force must not be allowed to beat up a union member’s family, blow up a bus, and break a legal strike. Yet a general strike was not an answer either. Equally ineffective were the solutions offered by some well-meaning church officials—a volley of prayers in one instance and, in another, a quasi-fascist dictatorship that would act against evil factory owners. These responses, he stated, betrayed the political illiteracy of French Canadians: “It is a notorious truth that the English Canadians have healthier political reflexes than we do. But this superiority has not come by chance: it derives from a civic education that is continuous from schooldays through daily life and is expressed by those English Canadians who think, write and discuss civic affairs.” Quebec, he said, must first choose democracy; then social good would follow. If it did not, hatred for the “rules” would grow, civil disobedience would stir, and violence would follow that would make the “massacre” of the textile workers at Louiseville seem like a picnic.45
Some aspects of Trudeau’s views were naïve, but his gibes about the excellence of English-Canadian democracy were deliberately provocative. Nevertheless, he was increasingly excited about Quebec, its future, and his participation in the debates that swirled around the changes taking place. Another participant in those debates, André Malavoy, recalled the “astonishing” intellectual clashes of the fifties:
All shrewd observers sensed imminent change, a real upheaval in the structure of politics, our way of life and our thoughts. As in all pre-revolutionary periods, the intellectuals at last engaged and were drawn into political action. In truth, they were not numerous—perhaps no more than two hundred people who knew each other and met often.
But how enriching were those meetings, those long nights of discussions, those projects and dreams.46
Emmanuel Mounier, the French Catholic personalist and founder of Esprit, had taught Trudeau to “see, judge, act.” It was now the time to act.
That summer, Trudeau began to encounter workers directly for the first time since his brief stint in the Sullivan mines in Abitibi seven years previously and his 1949 foray to Asbestos. Yet, theoretically, he and the Cité libre group had decided it was the workers who, through democratic means, were the best hope to overthrow the Duplessis regime and give birth to a modern, secular Quebec state whose leaders would be young francophone intellectuals like themselves. Trudeau was well prepared to act as the major players took their place in the public forum. His training as a lawyer and an economist provided him with the tools to take apart many of the arguments of the Duplessis government and the conservative nationalists, and he did so with a rapier that often cut quickly and deeply.
Two events deeply affected Trudeau’s activities in the mid-fifties, and defined his views of Quebec’s place in Canada as well as his own position in Quebec and Canadian intellectual life. The first was the decision of the province of Ontario to accept a taxrental agreement with th
e federal government, thereby breaking the alliance between Canada’s two largest provinces against the federal government’s assertive centralism. This decision caught Duplessis by surprise and forced him, and his opponents, to consider not only the revenue sources for the province but also Quebec’s response to the federal government’s increasing presence in the social and economic life of Canadians. In February 1953, when Maurice Duplessis created a Royal Commission on Federal-Provincial Relations, under Judge Thomas Tremblay, Trudeau was appointed to draft the brief of the Féderation des unions industrielles du Québec for the commission. The second event (as described in the next chapter) was the 1954 decision by Pelletier to pass over to his friend the long-delayed editing of a book on the Asbestos Strike. This task gave Trudeau a leadership role among a group of respected intellectuals and, most important, the opportunity to write the introduction and the conclusion to the book. Fate had made a choice.
Trudeau complained later that his acquaintances did not believe that he “worked” during the fifties. The comments angered him: “But, you know,” he replied, “I’d be working bloody hard—at writing articles and preparing my dossiers for whatever conciliation procedure I had or at administering my father’s estate, which my brother and sister had no inclination to do, or at receiving clients or visiting the labour groups.”47 His complaints are justified. His personal papers are crammed with arbitrations where he acted for the labour side. He carefully prepared notes for his summer visits to labour classes. He gave lectures or talks to labour groups in church basements or union halls. He would spend a week or a long weekend giving a more sustained series of presentations in educational sessions for workers. There are also numerous broadcasts, meetings, and articles that he drafted and redrafted. The creation of the newspaper Vrai by his friend Jacques Hébert brought new deadlines. His agendas are full, and, when travelling, he brought his work with him.
Trudeau rode his motorbike to the labour colleges, wore open shirts under his leather jacket, and appeared very much the rural teacher. His presentations were conventional explanations of the operations of the economic system, with particular attention to the place of the worker and the union. Although he was a member of the CCF, his lectures lacked ideology, and he accepted the idea that owners should have their profits. Of course, he was an owner himself who carefully monitored the profits from his family’s stake in the Belmont amusement park in Montreal. Even when dealing with trade unionism, he did not speak of nationalization—the subject that dominated British Labour Party Congresses in those times. In a course given at a school of metallurgy in January 1954, he neatly set out the principles of Keynesian economics without ever mentioning Keynes: budgetary surpluses in times of inflation compensate for deficits in times of unemployment, thus assuring the long-run prosperity of the nation. He was offered $25 for his course, but he returned the cheque—perhaps to the surprise of the organizers, who might have heard many stories about Trudeau’s careful ways with money.48 In another course in 1956 he spoke about politics rather than economics, although economics indirectly entered his discourse when he talked about the respective duties and jurisdictions of the federal and the provincial governments.
Trudeau’s work for the Tremblay Royal Commission on Federal-Provincial Relations made him a major figure both in Quebec and in Canada, a recognized authority on the Canadian Constitution and the division of powers. Because he wrote the brief for the international Fédération des unions industrielles du Québec, he worked closely with the Canadian Congress of Labour and its research director, Eugene Forsey—a charming and influential labour historian. At the time he wrote the brief, the debate on the economics of Canadian federalism had been stirred by the publication of Le fédéralisme canadien: Évolutions et problèmes, by Maurice Lamontagne. Its message, coming from a leading Quebec economist, brought enthusiastic approval in Ottawa and denunciation from nationalists in Quebec. Accepting the Keynesian argument Trudeau had presented to the workers, Lamontagne argued that only a strong central government could assure the prosperity and economic security that postwar policies had produced. From this point, he concluded that only a fuller integration into Canadian society could assure Quebec of the fiscal resources needed to modernize its society and provide economic security to French Canadians.49 Trudeau did not know Lamontagne, one of the organizers, with Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, of the Social Sciences faculty at the Université de Laval (which irritated Duplessis even more than Cité libre did), but he recognized the similarity of Lamontagne’s views to his own.50 So did Duplessis and traditional nationalists in Quebec. The battle formed around the Tremblay Commission.
Like Trudeau, Lamontagne called for a functional approach, one grounded in the new social sciences and in a better understanding of the way economic levels could be manipulated by experts to guarantee economic growth and equality. Le Devoir, so critical of Duplessis in many areas, nevertheless rejected Lamontagne’s claims, arguing that an “Ottawa-inspired social welfare state would result in a technocratic and bureaucratic nightmare of statistics, reports, and programs all unsuitable to the complex and ever-changing socioeconomic realities at the regional and local level. Ottawa’s social welfare state would lead to the regimentation of everyone, making them dependent upon a distant bureaucracy, ‘not eager to come to life, grow, study, work, suffer, age and die.’”51 For Trudeau, this attack on Lamontagne went too far, yet, despite similarities in language and approach, he disagreed with Lamontagne in many respects. In doing so, he drew on his own experience in Ottawa, where he had come to believe that the St. Laurent Liberal government was too careless about treading in provincial fields. That experience, along with his recognition as an economist, gave authority to his voice.
When the Fédération des unions industrielles du Québec presented its brief to the Tremblay Commission in March 1954, it attracted immediate attention because of its content and also because of its clear and sometimes eloquent prose: “The Federation is made up of men and women who use all of their earnings and energies to assure their material security and that of their family,” Trudeau declared. “They know that they are influenced more by the imperious need to earn their daily bread than [by] constitutional guarantees of their religious, cultural, and political evolution, for it is necessary to live before philosophizing …” The survival of the French language and culture depended neither on the law nor on literary conferences; rather, in an industrial age, he continued, it rested on the hard work of, and proper rewards to, the working class. He followed with a detailed analysis of the economic condition of Quebec’s working class and the economic inferiority of Quebec workers, compared with their Ontario counterparts.
The analysis, if not the approach, reflected Lamontagne. But when it came to specifics, the differences appeared. Trudeau believed that the federal government needed to possess adequate powers to secure economic stability and growth, but it did not require (as Lamontagne recommended) the replacement of tax-rental agreements with subsidies. Nor did the weakness of Quebec labour legislation justify a constitutional amendment transferring that authority to the federal government. In a federation, he said, such authority normally resided at the regional level. Closer cooperation among jurisdictions was essential, but each one should respect boundaries that were rational. Rather than reduce or eliminate areas where the provinces held responsibility, the provinces should make sure that they had the revenue necessary to carry out the services required at the regional level: “In effect, the unity of a political society depends on the will to assure the vital minimum to all members of the society, wherever they may live.”
The role of the federal government was clear: it had responsibility for economic stability. At the same time, Trudeau stressed, the provincial governments had to have taxation power and responsibility for education and the family—areas that were strictly in the provincial jurisdiction. The federal government must cease payments to universities and direct grants to families; in such cases, the funds should pass to the
provinces.52
Eugene Forsey scribbled large question marks on this passage of the draft Trudeau sent to him. Trudeau was never predictable. At a time when many reformers in Quebec, especially professors and college administrators, were ridiculing Duplessis’s refusal to accept federal government grants to universities, Trudeau took his side, a stance that would have important repercussions later. His attitude surprised many, but it reflected his increasingly defined views on Canadian federalism and his wariness about Ottawa. Why, he asked, should Quebecers or other Canadians put “the future of Canadian federalism entirely into the hands of federal economists”? Other traces of his scepticism towards Ottawa in the 1950s came in a Cité libre article in which he attacked, along with André Laurendeau and traditional nationalists, Ottawa’s refusal to consider tax deductibility for Quebec taxes on federal taxes: “The federal government and its clever civil servants accommodate themselves only too easily to a system that, at least until 1954, amounted to manifest defrauding of the Quebec taxpayer.”53