by John English
Perhaps I am beginning to look ridiculously like the running gentleman harassing the perfect woman … Still for a short while yet it remains that “spring is a ‘perhaps’ hand in a window,” and as I am leaving for France shortly I will have one more go at this perhaps business. And I invite you to tea, or dinner, or to the theater, or to the cinema, or the concert on Wednesday, the 26th. If you want to bother refusing or accepting, you can phone me at Dominions Hotel … Otherwise I will be waiting for you outside the Academy, 65 Gower St., between 5:15 and 5:45 on Wednesday.
Alas, we don’t know if she showed. But there were many others who did.20
In a time marked by conformity, Trudeau was different, and the difference charmed. He took a major role as a lawyer in the fifties in challenging orthodoxy, as the courts broke down the layers of prejudice that had formed around private clubs and social groups. This burst of “civil rights” cases reactivated Trudeau’s legal instincts and recalled his outrage in the previous decade with the internment of both Camillien Houde (for his opposition to conscription) and Adrien Arcand (for his fascist sympathies). The dramatic 1954 United States Supreme Court decision on racial segregation in schools, Brown vs. Board of Education, raised the bar for previously smug Canadians who had criticized Americans at the same time as they ignored segregation in Halifax and southern Ontario schools or overlooked clubs and universities that barred Jews.*
The newspaper Vrai became a crusading voice for those whose rights were destroyed or undermined, whether Jehovah’s Witnesses, mental patients, or Wilbert Coffin, a backwoods guide who, editor Jacques Hébert believed, had wrongfully been convicted of murdering three American hunters. Trudeau joined with his close friend Hébert in these campaigns and wrote long articles for him explaining the origins of democracy and liberty. When Duplessis called an election for June 20, 1956, Trudeau decided to stay in Quebec that spring to be an active participant in the campaign—active, but not Liberal. The Liberal Party was not yet a palatable alternative for him, even though its leader, Georges-Émile Lapalme, had restructured it and sought out better candidates. But the party was broke, while Duplessis’s Union nationale was awash with funds that it used shamelessly to favour friendly newspapers, buy gifts for voters, and reward constituencies that elected its candidates. Duplessis’s decisive victory seemed to confirm that, in Quebec, provincial election success could be bought. During the election, the sixty-six-year-old four-term premier faced a coalition of opponents ranging from the labour unions to the Social Credit “Créditiste” movement. Still, Duplessis managed to capture headlines, especially in his favoured rural areas, with inflammatory charges that the federal government, and Cabinet minister Jean Lesage in particular, had intervened by importing—of all things—“Communist eggs” from Poland to Quebec. By the time the Liberals recovered, the Union nationale “had already saturated the province with pamphlets and newspaper advertising conjuring up the lurid spectacle of the imminent arrival of a new communist armada flying the hammer and sickle, bringing more federally procured eggs for the unsuspecting breakfast tables of the province.”21
Meanwhile, the CCF had remade itself into the Parti social démocratique (PSD) under the leadership of Trudeau’s friend Thérèse Casgrain—the daughter of a millionaire French-Canadian stockbroker, and herself a remarkable and strikingly attractive woman—who had headed the campaign for women’s suffrage in Quebec for many decades. Grace Trudeau reported the name change to Pierre in the late summer of 1955, while he was driving his Jaguar in Europe: “Did you know that the CCF party name had been changed? Mrs. Casgrain was invited on the TV last week to give her views—as she remarked to me on the phone today—this was no doubt only because of changing the party’s name.” She also wrote in October that “Mrs. Casgrain” had called to discuss an article about her that had appeared in Le Devoir. She generally liked it, except for a “remark on her figure ‘taille haute et robuste.’” In Grace’s opinion, the photograph beside the article denied the adjective “robuste.”22 Trudeau supported Casgrain in her whimsical quest to reposition the party, but we do not know whether, in the privacy of the polling booth in Outremont, he voted for Lapalme (who stood for the Liberals in the riding and won overwhelmingly) or he was one of the 726 souls who cast their ballot for the PSD candidate (who finished last behind the Communist contender).
We do know that Trudeau joined with several other left-leaning personalities, including René Lévesque, in writing a letter to Le Devoir attacking the Liberal Party for its phoney “nationalist” attack on the PSD for being centralist and controlled by English Canadians.23 Overall, the PSD won only 0.6 percent of the vote, while Duplessis triumphed with 51.8 percent and seventy-three seats—both figures slightly higher than in 1952.24 It was a stunning defeat for the Liberals, who took only twenty seats, three fewer than before, with 45 percent of the vote. The results provided vivid testimony to the ineffectiveness of the opposition and the unfairness of the electoral system.
What did Duplessis’s triumph mean? Did all those carefully crafted articles, those brilliant analyses of the inevitable emergence of Quebec from an authoritarian, priest-ridden past, and the engagement in opposition of so many of the finest minds of the media and the university count for so little? How did it all happen? In his first article in Cité libre in 1950, Trudeau had called on those who opposed the current regime in Quebec to be “coldly intelligent.” Perhaps they were not.
The election results, as well as the refusal of the Liberals to integrate the Cité libre program into their own platform, suggest that Trudeau and his colleagues were sowing a lot of seed on very barren ground. Cité libre has loomed large in history because its principals later became eminent in Quebec and in Canadian public life. At the time, however, the journal merely exasperated Duplessis and was usually ignored. It was not compulsory reading among Quebec City politicians or officials.25 Moreover, its range was surprisingly narrow and its publication irregular. In the final four years of the Union nationale, 1956 through 1959, Cité libre published a grand total of nine irregularly spaced issues. The subscription records also fail to impress. In February 1954 Cité libre had only 444 subscribers, of whom 115 had not paid or had disappeared. The remainder were sold by the directors or in bookshops. In 1957–58 the print run was approximately 1,500 copies, compared with almost 15,000 for the Jesuit-controlled Relations and over 2,000 for L’Action nationale.
In addition, Cité libre’s range and character of subscribers in the mid-fifties was disappointing. There were only six subscriptions from France, and few outside Ottawa or the province of Quebec. The grand hopes of a journal that would complement or even rival France’s politically influential and socialist Esprit had been abandoned. The French, as happened too often, did not reciprocate the warm embrace of the Cité libristes and, by the end of the 1950s, Trudeau, Pelletier, and others grumbled about Esprit’s ignorance of Quebec. Members of the journal’s editorial board constantly reminded friends to renew, carried issues to conferences, and extracted a few dollars from those who could afford it. Trudeau sent mocking letters to friends, saying that, if they were truly poor, they need not pay the $2 subscription cost; otherwise, they should pay up. Pierre Vadeboncoeur, whose “share” Trudeau initially subsidized, compensated by enthusiastically selling copies wherever he went. For Guy Cormier, who had moved to New Brunswick, the pressure to peddle and personally subsidize the journal was too much, and he tried to resign in 1958. Maurice Blain attempted to escape as well. Finally, in 1960, after the fall of Duplessis, the review was reorganized under the leadership of Jacques Hébert, fully funded, and suddenly began to prosper. Ironically, its best times lay in the past.26
It’s easy to mock a bunch of intellectuals talking to themselves, having long dinners and debates over wine in living rooms or basements furnished with cracked-leather couches, their wives and girlfriends mostly silent or pouring the drinks, and the men warily testing the newcomers or arguing over where commas belong.* Despite its infrequency and li
mitations, however, Cité libre mattered enormously to Trudeau at the time—and later. He had no university position, no regular column in a newspaper, no affiliation with a major political party, no seat on corporate boards, and, unlike René Lévesque with his regular program, he appeared only intermittently on the sensational new medium of television.
Trudeau seemed to resent Lévesque’s celebrity, particularly when he became the exciting new voice of the French-language media after his dramatic coverage of the Korean War. The anecdote about their first meeting in a CBC cafeteria is revealing. “Hi, guys!” Lévesque said as he spied Trudeau and Pelletier at a table planning a new issue of Cité libre. But before Lévesque could sit down, Trudeau retorted: “Hey, Lévesque, you’re a hell of a good speaker, but I’m starting to wonder whether you can write.” Lévesque had failed to deliver some promised piece for the journal. “How can I find the time?” Lévesque shot back. But Trudeau would not relent: “Television’s all very well,” he said, “but there’s nothing solid about it, as you know … Now, if you knew how to write, maybe with a little effort now and then—” “If that’s what you think, you can go peddle your potatoes, you bloody washout of an intellectual,” Lévesque exploded.27 Cité libre gave Trudeau the finest potatoes he could peddle at the time.
The subscribers might be few, but they talked a lot and eventually they mattered. Frank Scott congratulated the editors on the first issue, in which he found “the socialist spirit was present even if it was well hidden.” Senator Charles “Chubby” Power, a powerful Quebec City minister in the King government, wrote to Trudeau in 1953 congratulating him on the journal but, interestingly, dissenting on his strong criticism of Quebec nationalism. Father Georges-Henri Lévesque took notice of Trudeau’s ideas in Cité libre, as did young students who would later make their mark in Quebec intellectual and political life. Pelletier complained that although the journal had an enormous impact in religious colleges, that influence meant only two or three subscriptions because tattered and clandestine copies were passed around almost like sexy French postcards. The author Roch Carrier recalled how a young priest would quiz him about Cité libre, and he soon began to realize that it was not to rebuke him but to discover what the sensational but forbidden publication had recently said.28 At a time when Trudeau’s responses to criticisms of his writings were denied publication by Catholic reviews or newspapers, Cité libre provided him with a platform from which to respond.
The readers included Guy Favreau and Lucien Cardin, both future justice ministers in the Pearson government; Eugene Forsey, the research director of the Canadian Congress of Labour; many Canadian diplomats, including Jean Chapdelaine, Pierre Trottier, and Trudeau’s future undersecretary of external affairs, Marcel Cadieux; as well as the Union nationale politician Daniel Johnson, the eminent journalist Blair Fraser, the poet Earle Birney, the young philosopher Charles Taylor, and Canada’s renowned political philosopher C.B. Macpherson. As the editor, Trudeau dealt directly with submissions from authors, and he now had the opportunity to work closely with the finest young minds in Quebec, including the political scientist Léon Dion, the sociologist Guy Rocher, and the essayist Jean Le Moyne (who would be his French speech writer when he became prime minister). The relationships that he forged as editor lasted—and they mattered.29
Still, the criticisms of the journal stung. The 1956 devastating election results revealed how politically ineffectual not only Cité libre but also the other critics of the Duplessis government had been. The Liberal performance in Quebec deeply disappointed; and, alarmingly, the Liberal government in Ottawa had also begun to stumble. St. Laurent slumped in his Commons seat in depression as the Conservatives and others ferociously attacked his government for arrogance. Well past the biblical three score and ten, St. Laurent seemed incapable of reacting imaginatively to the challenges of Canada and Quebec. The government drifted and, in 1957, it was defeated by the Conservatives under John Diefenbaker. The Conservatives lost the popular vote because Quebec remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Liberals and St. Laurent, yet they won the most seats and formed the government on June 21, 1957. The unilingual Diefenbaker won only nine seats in Quebec but managed to take power by ignoring Quebec in his electoral strategy. St. Laurent soon resigned, and Pearson became his inevitable successor as Liberal Party leader. In Montreal, Jean Drapeau, who had been elected as mayor on a reform platform in 1954, lost his position in 1957. It was, for the reformers, a bitter loss and a bad year.
This rapid shift of the political terrain left Pierre Trudeau and his colleagues much less surefooted, so in the summer of 1956 he and others organized Le Rassemblement, a grouping of intellectuals, professionals, and labour officials with the specific goal of promoting democracy. It refused to affiliate with any party, but, instead, announced it would work for progressive approaches to Quebec politics. Trudeau had always admired popular movements and their leaders—men such as Paul Gouin, Henri Bourassa, and, in the city of Montreal, Jean Drapeau. They had rejected the special interests embedded in the traditional parties and set out to create their own parties—groupings based on a popular movement with a clear program. He hoped to do the same with the Rassemblement.
At its founding convention on September 8, the noted scientist and academic Pierre Dansereau from the Université de Montréal became its first president, with Trudeau as vice-president. Among the directors were his friends and colleagues André Laurendeau, Jacques Hébert, and Gérard Pelletier. The Rassemblement mingled Cité libre modernizers with neonationalists like Laurendeau who believed that traditional nationalism’s link with the church was dangerously misguided, and that Quebec’s social and economic system needed rapid change. Few members had direct political experience, and most were suspicious of political involvement. The new organization existed uneasily somewhere between a lobbying group and a fledgling political party. Not surprisingly, it was politically ineffective.30
Laurendeau, who had worked with the Bloc populaire canadien in the forties, soon lost interest as the members began to bicker.* The Laval political scientist Gérard Bergeron, an early member, identified the problem in his 1957 description of the “Rassemblement type” as one who had originally disdained direct political action, then become involved in social action, and, suddenly, in the mid-fifties, realized that the solution to social problems must come through the “politics” he continued to despise. In his memoirs, Trudeau claimed that he turned to the Rassemblement because the major parties in Quebec remained unacceptable and the CCF’s Parti social démocratique was weak, its policies too centralist and too reflective of the concerns of English Canada. The only alternative was the Rassemblement, a “fragile and short-lived body … [created] to defend and promote democracy in Quebec against the threats posed by corruption and authoritarianism.”
Throughout its brief history, its members quarrelled about membership, possible affiliation with the Parti social démocratique, and the role they should take in direct political action. Trudeau persisted in his belief that the Rassemblement was the best political choice available, and he became its third and final president in 1959. By then, Laurendeau had resigned, saying that he found the group’s intellectualism too remote from the everyday voter, who, in the end, would decide the nature of social change.31
Laurendeau’s complaints about the Rassemblement were cause for concern, but Jean Marchand’s opposition was much more serious. After meeting with “Comrade Marchand” in late August 1957, Pelletier told Trudeau that Marchand wanted to reflect on matters before proceeding further with the group. He specifically wanted “a self-examination about what we are and what we are doing about the R and what the relationship between the R and the real world is.” Marchand always insisted that Pelletier’s and Trudeau’s intellectual activities should have a direct connection to the “real” world, where workers woke at 6 a.m., earned barely enough to send their children to school, and lacked the pensions that would have protected them in their old age. The Conféderation des travailleurs c
atholiques du Canada (CTCC) was divided on the usefulness of the Rassemblement, and the other unions had merged to become the Quebec Federation of Labour (QFL). This new organization was directly linked with the Canadian Labour Congress, and its leaders were urging workers to support the CCF. Where did that leave the Rassemblement?32
In the end, Marchand did abandon the Rassemblement, but it lingered on in political limbo. Although Trudeau remained active, the organization was feeble, with membership fees arriving intermittently and a bank balance of only $71.13 on August 15, 1958.33 In The Asbestos Strike in 1956, Trudeau had argued for a just society based on socialist principles, but one year later he was already recoiling from the Parti social démocratique, the Quebec socialist party, and claiming that “democracy” must come before the social revolution. Quebec, he urged, must have democracy before it could change its social and economic institutions.
Despite his frustration with the political scene in Quebec, Trudeau split with his reformist colleagues on one provocative issue—his argument that Duplessis was correct to refuse federal grants for universities. Yet here, too, he was being consistent, for he had already expressed this view in the brief he had written in 1954 for the Tremblay Commission. He had been overruled by the research director, Eugene Forsey, so the draft was altered, but Trudeau’s mind was not.34 He had recommended a clear division of responsibilities between the federal and the provincial governments, along with restraint by the federal government in using its taxing authority to invade provincial fields. When, in 1956, Louis St. Laurent allowed Quebec’s grants to be held in trust by the National Conference of Canadian Universities until Duplessis relented, Trudeau’s opposition seemed inexplicable to some and infuriating to others.
Trudeau responded in Cité libre the following January, arguing that the federal government had no right to take excess tax revenues and create devices by which it could then invade provincial jurisdictions. The crisis of the universities, which, in the fifties, were becoming the motors of modernization, was real. Between 1945 and 1953, the enrolment at Laval had grown by 109.6 percent and, in the same period, the Quebec government’s budget had increased by 194 percent. Yet the provincial grant to Laval had gone up only 7 percent. Professors, whose salaries had exceeded those of most other professionals in 1940, had, by 1951, seen their average earnings rise by only 17.4 percent to $3,850 per year, while other professionals saw an increase from $2,502 to $9,206 in the same period.35