by John English
By the mid-1950s Trudeau had become a close student of Canadian federalism and a defender of provincial rights. At the same time, he remained a social reformer who believed that the federal government was responsible for economic growth and stability and for promoting equity among regions and peoples. Nor surprisingly, he attracted the attention of English Canadians, who saw in him a perfectly bilingual and articulate opponent to the “reactionary” Duplessis government in Quebec. Through his friend Frank Scott, Trudeau met leading CCF intellectuals as well as Eugene Forsey and others associated with the Canadian Labour Congress. These English Canadians immediately recognized his political usefulness. Trudeau did not believe in a major constitutional revision and did not deprecate the influence of British institutions in the development of democratic habits. His attitudes infuriated conservative Quebec nationalists, such as the historian Robert Rumilly, who attacked him as a French Canadian who “goes to Toronto to hurl abuse against French Canadians, in English, before the English, for which he is celebrated as a grand spirit, a genius.” Rumilly’s harsh description of Trudeau’s arguments did not greatly distort them: Trudeau believed that the French Canadians had foolishly subordinated their politics and economics to the defence of their ethnicity. Moreover, their strong Catholicism made them too respectful of hierarchy, resulting in an attitude, in his words, that “combines political superstition with social conservatism.”54
Rumilly, a Duplessis supporter in Canada and a monarchist in France,55 dismissed Trudeau as a leftist but did not deny the sincerity of his Catholic beliefs. Trudeau’s writings, while reflective of the progressive social tradition of Catholic personalism, drew increasingly on contemporary social science as it was developing in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Britain. For that reason, his voice and his sources resonated in English Canada. Yet Anglo-American social science alone does not explain the character of his analysis and discourse in the mid-1950s.
After the encounter with Archbishop Léger, the rebuke from Father d’Anjou, and his many quarrels with official Catholic voices, Trudeau became more determined to challenge the sway of the official Catholic Church in Quebec. His writing becomes more openly secular; his determination to challenge church conservatism more marked; the willingness to call himself anticlerical much greater. He lost interest in debates within the church and concentrated on arguments about the church. Sylvia Ostry, then a young economist and later an eminent scholar and public servant, recalls how Trudeau would become animated and emotional in the mid-fifties when he spoke with her in cafés about the church’s oppressive presence in Quebec.56 When he was attacked in L’Action catholique because he said that clerics should withdraw entirely from politics, he repeated the argument at greater length in following issues of Le Devoir. 57 Increasingly, he became a public presence, along with his Cité libre colleagues. He loved debates on topics such as “Does Canada need other political parties?” (Trudeau feared a new nationalist party would be conservative); “Does Canada need a stronger military?” (No, said Trudeau, who pointed to “the futility of a good part of our military efforts”); or “Do Canadians need identity cards?” (Trudeau was firmly opposed). One television program, “Idées en marche,” attracted Duplessis’s wrath when Trudeau supported Louis St. Laurent’s statement that Quebec was not a “different” province “from a constitutional point of view.” Television captured attention, and so, increasingly, did Pierre Trudeau.58
These days, he had a new determination and direction. When he left on a trip in 1954, he took a long list of friends to whom he would write, many of them women. The despair he had expressed about himself and the future to Pelletier and, earlier, to Helen Segerstrale had disappeared. In August 1955 he wrote to Helen, who was now married in Europe. The tone was markedly different. “I have been doing the expected,” he noted, “practising law with the trade unions in Canada, but I also manage to do a lot of writing, radio & television work. It is all very satisfying, especially because I can satisfy my wanderlust from time to time.”59
Pierre Trudeau was finally home.
* Ryan reported that he said to Léger that “the group at Cité libre are Christians and their intentions are sound,” that they were among his friends. He advised the archbishop to see Trudeau and Pelletier before he acted, but nothing happened. When Ryan next met Léger, the archbishop asked why they had not come. Ryan replied that “they were probably waiting for their invitation.” After some time sorting out how it should be handled, the meeting was arranged. Pelletier to Trudeau, Feb. 28, 1951, TP, vol. 21, file 21.
* Rolland, whose family owned a large paper company, said later that they enjoyed being outrageous together, getting into pranks that made their families furious. Grace’s letters reveal, however, that she, at least, enjoyed hearing about their escapades.
* In 1954 Trudeau took an IQ test at the University of Ottawa. The Wechsler Test had seven categories and Trudeau was measured against the francophone population of Ottawa between the age of fifteen and sixty years. The results, interestingly, reflected his marks at Brébeuf. He ranked highest in mathematical and abstract reasoning (excellent) and lower in visual motor tasks (average and above average). His “average” ranking in attention and short-term memory was surely wrong. In any event, his overall ranking was the highest possible (excellent). Maurice Chagnon, University of Ottawa, to Pierre Trudeau, Feb. 1954, TP, vol.14, file 37.
He also had a “Miss Parsons,” who appears to have been a female colleague, analyze his handwriting. She told him that his mind was “extraordinary. Brilliant, searching, certainly above the average.” In a remarkably perceptive analysis, she wrote: “You are methodical in procedure, accurate and dependable … You may give the appearance of not noticing people and their actions, or what is going on around you to any great extent, but you intuitively understand and observe more, in five minutes, than the ordinary individual would observe in a day.” She noted that he was shy but could also be “the life of any party.” He had a quick temper and a tongue that could bite. He gave the appearance “for the most part of a gentle nature, and you probably are, but you can certainly be the opposite at will.” She concluded, perhaps expressing a personal experience, that his interest in women was “nil.” He admired beauty, “but it does not go any deeper, either by intent or nature.” She concluded that there was “a great deal more to this writing of yours than meets the eye.” One suspects that personal contact as much as Trudeau’s unremarkable handwriting guided Ms. Parsons’s analysis. D.L. Parsons to Trudeau, nd, ibid.
* The ballet lessons he took with Sylvia Knelman, later the eminent economist Sylvia Ostry. Conversation with Dr. Ostry.
* Although the 5’10″ height he always listed for his passports may be in doubt, his tailor’s records indicate that, in 1955, at age thirty-six, his neck size was a well-muscled 15 inches, his chest 38, and his waist only 32. TP, vol. 14, file 1.
* Trudeau had been deeply influenced by dreams of a “middle way” between Communism and capitalism. His experience around the world had made him sympathetic to national liberation movements in colonial empires—developments the Soviet Union ostensibly championed and many Western states opposed. In Ottawa there had already been an example of this interest.
During his world tour in 1949, French Indochina, as it then was, had charmed him. He admired the people and the mingling of French and Asian culture. Now a public servant, on October 2, 1950, he took two “Annamite gentlemen” to call on the External Affairs’ Asian specialist, Arthur Menzies: Peter Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, the archbishop in Hué, Indochina, and his brother Ngo Dinh Diem. Five years later, Ngo Dinh Diem would become president of an independent South Vietnam, only to be killed by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1963, just as the Vietnam War entered its bloodiest years and three weeks before the assassination of President John Kennedy. In the External Affairs memorandum on the meeting, Trudeau is reported as saying little, but he expressed scepticism in a later marginal note he wrote about “American weap
ons” being an appropriate response to the challenge of Vietnamese
Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. “Like building up Chiang Kai Shek!” he scribbled. Although he believed deeply in decolonization, he knew that the process could be difficult, and he thought the Americans were usually clumsy in their attempt to preserve capitalist interests during the decolonization process. In his conversation that day, Diem was adamant that France should not fight to keep Indochina; indeed, he said that French culture, which the Vietnamese treasured, should be maintained through French Canada, whose missionaries were highly respected in Indochina. Trudeau agreed: whether in Algeria or Indochina, he opposed the French Empire but supported a French cultural presence.
This belief was ultimately the basis for later Canadian efforts to create a community of francophone-speaking countries. The incident reveals how Trudeau’s international politics drew deeply on his European education and possessed neither the anti-Communism of the Catholic Church nor the American suspicion that led the United States into Indochina and the Vietnam War. “Visit of Monseigneur Thuc and Mr. Ngo-Dinh-Diem,” Oct. 2, 1950, TP, vol. 10, file 11. Dr. Greg Donaghy, the Foreign Affairs historian, informs me that the record of this meeting is missing in departmental papers.
* In his memoirs published in 1989, Ford was forgetful, discreet, or exceedingly diplomatic about this incident. He said he met Trudeau when he “unexpectedly turned up in Moscow at a mysterious economic conference organized by the Soviets and attended mostly by representatives of communist front organizations,” and that Trudeau also became fed up with Russian lodgings and food. Strangely, given the story told by the U.S. envoy, he concluded his account: “Nor did he hesitate to accompany my wife and myself to Easter mass in the impromptu chapel of the American embassy.” Robert A.D. Ford, Our Man in Moscow: A Diplomat’s Reflections on the Soviet Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 113. However, he was more caustic in an interview with Professor Robert Bothwell on October 15, 1987. “Going off the record,” Ford asked: “What should one make of a prime minister who in 1952 had visited Moscow to attend the conference of a front organization? He’d enjoyed Hotel Rossiya food for a week before he came to the embassy for relief dinners—after which he ate well enough and clung to the embassy. But no explanation of why he was there.” Then he said to Professor Bothwell, at the embassy “he liked us and we liked him.” He discovered caviar there and always contrasted the treatment in Moscow with the bad treatment he received at other Canadian missions. Really, Ford said, Trudeau was “one of the brightest and most attractive people” he had ever met. Interview with Robert Ford, Oct. 15, 1987, Robert Bothwell Papers, University of Toronto Archives.
CHAPTER 7
EVE OF THE REVOLUTION
The 1949 Asbestos Strike in the Eastern Townships was a decisive moment in the history of Quebec—and in the life of Pierre Trudeau. The strike actually defined Trudeau more than it changed the province. The victory of the Catholic unions, which was achieved through negotiation, was surprising, but it proved difficult to build upon. The Duplessis regime did not crumble, and the Catholic Church retained its dominance. Trudeau quickly discovered that he could not get a position at the Université de Montréal, but he at least had independence—the product of his inheritance and his own will. He remained determined to learn from the experience of the strike.
The international unions had strongly supported the strike and sought to take advantage of it. Some of the strike leaders, including Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand, and Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) activists, decided that a book should be written to describe the diverse experiences of the strikers, their clerical and intellectual supporters, and the labour unions—which, for the first time, had shown exceptional resolve in confronting the Duplessis government and the multinational companies connected with the mines. Two years later, Recherches sociales, a group funded by the Canadian Labour Congress to strengthen socialist sentiment among francophones, commissioned a book that would analyze how the strike represented “a turning point in the social history of Quebec” and “inform the general public of the cruel or reassuring lessons we had learned.”1 F.R. Scott, the McGill law professor and socialist activist, was the director of the project, with Gérard Pelletier as editor. When Pelletier’s schedule became too busy, his Cité libre co-editor, Pierre Trudeau, took on the task. Trudeau had not edited a book before, nor had he ever written a sustained analytical essay of the type needed here for the introduction and the conclusion. The project had significant potential—but would prove a challenge.
Trudeau was now thirty-two years old and arbitrating labour disputes, researching the brief for the Féderation des unions industrielles du Québec (FUIQ) for the Tremblay Commission on Federal-Provincial Relations, writing articles for Cité libre and various newspapers, teaching courses for little or no money to workers during the summer, and, of course, travelling.* Most of the authors who had agreed to write the other articles for the book on the Asbestos Strike worked closely with the labour movement: Maurice Sauvé was the technical adviser for the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (CCCL); Pelletier edited Le Travail for the CCCL and was its director of public relations; Jean Gérin-Lajoie worked for the United Steel Workers; and Charles Lussier, like Trudeau, practised labour law. Other authors included Father Gérard Dion of Laval University, the editor of Relations industrielles; Réginald Boisvert, a television writer who specialized in working-class dramas; and the brilliant young Laval sociologist Fernand Dumont, who agreed to explore the historical forces that “prepared the scene for the Asbestos Strike.”2 F.R. Scott would write the foreword. A disciplined worker, Scott soon despaired as the editor and the authors continually missed their deadlines.3 There was additional delay as Trudeau tried, unsuccessfully—and with the help of author Anne Hébert, on whom he had an unrequited “crush”—to find a French publisher in the fall of 1955. To his chagrin, he discovered there was little interest in contemporary Quebec in Paris.4
Progress on the book was further delayed when Trudeau departed for Europe in the winter of 1955–56, but he tried, with the assistance of Laval political scientist Jean-Charles Falardeau, to stitch the volume together while he was away. Still manuscripts did not arrive, and promises went unkept. Falardeau himself apologized abjectly just before Christmas: “I repeat to you, Pierre, that I understand, that Frank [Scott] understands, that Gérard [Pelletier] understands your impatience, [we understand] even the disgust of which you spoke some time ago. You accepted, and you fulfilled your responsibility, to edit this volume to completion, you carried out these chores briskly and, with good reason, you already had enough of it in the summer.” Falardeau was astonished that Trudeau “in these circumstances and despite all, remained so patient.” When something mattered, however, Trudeau could be patient indeed.5
Finally, in 1956, a complete text came together, and the Cité libre press became the publisher. Trudeau wrote two major essays for the book: a long introduction describing the social, economic, and cultural context of the strike, and an epilogue reflecting on the effects of the strike and on developments in Quebec after 1949. Polemical, angry, eloquent, these essays remain his finest analytical writing.
Through the prism of the Asbestos Strike, he illuminated the calamity of Quebec in the twentieth century, a time of “servile and stupefied silence” in which the social doctrine of the Catholic Church was “invoked in support of authoritarianism and xenophobia” until, in Asbestos in 1949, “the worm-eaten remnants of a bygone age” finally came apart.6 The many drafts among his personal papers and the delays confirm that Trudeau chose these and other inflammatory words and sentences carefully. What separates these essays from other of his writings is their detailed research, especially on the economic history of Quebec, and the extensive presentation of facts in support of his arguments. In social scientific terms, he sought to rearrange the “facts” of Quebec’s historical experience and then establish new norms for behaviour in that society. Although nearly all
the arguments had already appeared in Trudeau’s earlier writings, they are presented here more clearly and consistently in a brilliant attempt to convince “a whole generation, [which] hesitates on the brink of commitment,” to smash old totems and “examine the rich alternatives offered by the future.”7
Trudeau organized his introduction meticulously, beginning with the “facts,” followed by the “ideas,” and then the “institutions.” The facts established that Quebec had benefited from industrialization and modernization, although the riches had not flowed as bounteously to the francophone population as to others because “we fought [modernization] body and soul.” Ideas had mattered: “In Quebec … during the first half of the twentieth century, our social thinking was so idealistic … so divorced from reality … that it was hardly ever able to find expression in living and dynamic institutions.” Nationalism became a system of defence that “put a premium on all the contrary forces” to progress: “the French language, Catholicism, authoritarianism, idealism, rural life, and later a return to the land.” At a time when French Canadians confronted a materialistic, commercial, and increasingly democratic North America, nationalism became a “system of thought” that rejected “the present in favour of an imagined past.”8
The institutions of a modern state were either stunted or stillborn in Quebec, he argued, principally because of the predominance of the Roman Catholic Church, with its conservative and nationalist doctrine. Labour unions were feeble, the press servile, and political parties corrupt. The fault lay with the leaders, not the people, because the church had never encouraged the political education of the masses. Votes were sold on election day for a bottle of whisky by citizens who spoke righteously after Mass on Sunday about the common good of society. Yet these same leaders simply “rejected any political action likely to result in economic reforms” because “liberal economic reforms were proposed by the ‘English’” and “socialist reforms by ‘materialists.’” Instead, they pursued quixotic dreams of a return to the land and of corporatism, an economic philosophy “which had the advantage of not requiring any critical reflection.” Church and state combined to exclude or condemn those who challenged this consensus, whether they be Communists, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the left, or the English. The universities, under the heavy hand of the clergy, also avoided not only critical reflection but also modern technology and social science. In these collective failures lay the importance of the Asbestos Strike, which “assumed the proportions of a social upheaval.”9