by John English
In the late winter of 1956, just as the book on the Asbestos Strike was finally to be published, Trudeau heard that Scott was planning a trip to learn first hand about the North. As an experienced voyageur, Trudeau apparently called Scott to ask if he could join him on the adventure. Initially Scott was taken aback, but he respected Trudeau’s ability in the wilds and, perhaps, Trudeau also intrigued him. Once in the canoe together, they got along well. Both were physically strong, although Trudeau, the smaller man, typically took on challenges that seemed reckless to Scott. Ever the poet, he described one occasion when Trudeau entered a tremendous surge of water at the point where the Peace River and Lake Athabasca merged. He yelled, “You can’t go into that,” but Trudeau ignored his pleas and forged on:
Pierre, suddenly challenged,
Stripped and walked into the rapids,
Firming his feet against rock,
Standing white, in white water,
Leaning south up the current
To stem the downward rush,
A man testing his strength
Against the strength of his country.51
Just as Trudeau’s journeys in the early 1940s had traced the path of the nationalist hero, so the journey into the Canadian Northwest also seems to have been a nationalist experience, one that made Scott and Trudeau understand the vastness of the land, its harsh demands, and its endless rewards. In another of his poems on the trip, “Fort Providence,” Scott wrote:
We came out of Beaver Lake
Into swift water,
Past the Big Snye, past Providence Island
And nosed our barges into shore
Till they grated on stones and sand.
Gang planks, thrown to the bank,
Were all we had for dock
To drop four tons of freight.
A line of men were squatting
Silently above us, straight
Black hair, swarthy skins.
Slavies they call them, who left
Their name on Lake and River.
None of them spoke or moved
Just sat and watched, quietly,
While the white man heaved at his hardware.
Farther on, by themselves,
The women and girls were huddled.
They saw from far off the fortlike school where a Grey Nun from Montreal was in charge, and they spoke French to the priests and nuns who taught the native Slaveys in their own broken English.
We walked through the crowded classrooms.
No map of Canada or the Territories,
No library or workshop,
Everywhere religious scenes,
Christ and Saints, Stations of the Cross,
Beads hanging from nails, crucifixes,
And two kinds of secular art
Silk-screen prints of the Group of Seven,
And crayon drawings and masks
Made by the younger children,
The single visible expression
Of the soul of these broken people.
Upstairs on the second storey
Seventy little cots
Touching end to end
In a room 30 by 40
Housed the resident boys
In this firetrap mental gaol.
The natives learning English from French priests, the missing maps, and the haunting reference to the residential school surely left a deep imprint on Pierre Trudeau’s mind, one that would later influence his own and his country’s future.52 For now, however, the adventurers returned home safely, bonded by their challenge to the Canadian North and their common understanding of Canada’s possibilities.* Just as he had at the Ontario camp long before, Trudeau had tested his strength against a foreign physical world and discovered he could conquer it easily.
Trudeau began to participate regularly in English-language television programs, including coverage of the 1958 election with his old family friend Blair Fraser on the CBC, and he took part in other activities organized by English-Canadian groups. In 1957, for example, at the World University Service of Canada summer program in Ghana, other delegates included Douglas Anglin, a Carleton University specialist on Africa; James Talman, from the University of Western Ontario; Don Johnston, Trudeau’s future lawyer and Cabinet minister; Robert Kaplan, another Trudeau minister to be; Tim Porteous, a future Trudeau staff member; and Martin Robin, who was to teach Margaret Sinclair before Trudeau married her. In the discussions about Canada in Ghana, Anglin and others argued that federalism should be highly centralized, but Trudeau countered that federalism, even in an “industrial age” that needed strong government, should be seen as a counterweight to the deadening effect of bureaucracy and a tool to bring government “closer to the people.” Porteous, who was one of the creators of the wildly successful McGill revue Spring Thaw, recalls that Trudeau was shy but completely unpredictable. He insisted on breaking the anglophone monotony by taking a side journey to neighbouring francophone states.53
Trudeau’s activities among English Canadians attracted little notice at the time in the intense debates going on in Quebec, where the Rassemblement and the Union des forces démocratiques were now cast to the side as the forces of opposition to Maurice Duplessis gathered behind Jean Lesage. Trudeau’s position became more difficult. Political scientist Léon Dion criticized the negative tone of Trudeau’s analysis of Quebec politics and his excessive reliance on arguments about the past. Others were less polite. The Nouvelles illustrées began to make Trudeau a regular target. Its gossip column mocked his “election” to the presidency of the Rassemblement, implying with considerable truth that the organization was elitist and its elections meaningless. In an anonymous letter to the editor of the same journal on April 25, 1959, the author urged that Trudeau should be sent on the first interplanetary journey so he could establish his new party on the moon, where “it would be more useful.”
Trudeau’s efforts seemed increasingly quixotic and even a waste of his considerable talent. In the McGill Daily of October 31, 1958, “Jean David” commented on the Democratic Manifesto. “Generally,” he wrote, “the author is considered to be a brilliant man but to many [he] still remains a dilettante. This means that Trudeau himself has a limited influence but his ideas are usually taken into account.” The effect of the manifesto, he continued, would be tied to the reaction of Quebec political leaders. At McGill a few months later, Trudeau once again said that because the “people” have not been taught democracy, they should create a completely new party. It was, he said, “the only way out.”54 A few days later in a debate on Radio-Canada, Jean Drapeau firmly rejected the Union des forces démocratiques as an effective tool to bring down Duplessis.55 Trudeau could brush off student complaints and even Drapeau, but now he received a blow that troubled him more: his friend from childhood, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, attacked his Democratic Manifesto.
Vadeboncoeur had worked closely with Trudeau on all his projects, hailing his return to Quebec in Le Devoir in 1949 as a giant step towards a new day in Quebec. His anti-nationalism was even stronger than Trudeau’s in the early 1950s, and both spoke regularly, if vaguely, of revolution. He was the butt of Trudeau’s pranks, which he fully reciprocated. You remain, he wrote in 1955, “the one guy in the world I love, with whom I love to laugh and be reckless.” Although Vadeboncoeur was a lawyer by training, a labour activist by profession, and a successful essayist by nature, he was perpetually short of money. Trudeau lent him funds when he needed them, as he had since they had both begun classes at Académie Querbes decades before. From the beginning it had been a strong, mutually supportive friendship.
In 1959, however, Vadeboncoeur became exasperated with his old friend. First in a labour-socialist publication and then in Le Devoir, he gently attacked the Union des forces démocratiques and Trudeau. “You’ll find,” he began, “that the analysts who are too clear-sighted sometimes make the greatest errors. The famous options that are proposed by that deeply penetrating spirit—that is my oldest friend, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau—are of such a
kind.” Soon after, in Le Social Démocrate and then in Le Devoir on May 9, he denounced the Union as “le Club de M. Trudeau,” an elitist bunch who were undermining the possibility of socialism while ineptly promoting the Liberal Party. It was a hard punch, and it hurt Trudeau.56 However, old friends can take blows, and Trudeau took it in good spirit.
When Pierre Vadeboncoeur made his attack in Le Devoir, Trudeau was away on another long trip around the world. Then events in Quebec moved quickly in his absence: the strike by producers at Radio-Canada in mid-1959 resulted in a political earthquake that turned René Lévesque and others into neonationalists. Trudeau himself later identified Radio-Canada as the strongest force in breaking through the media monopoly and the elite’s fears, both of which had protected Duplessis’s autocracy. The strike, therefore, had dramatic implications for the flow of free political information in the province. During this crisis, on September 7, Maurice Duplessis died unexpectedly after a series of strokes. The tattered remnants of the Rassemblement, along with critics such as Vadeboncoeur and Casgrain, accused Trudeau of departing just as the battle lines formed, but, in truth, he was not ready for further battle. His letters and his papers at the time suggest that he was eager to escape the infighting and quarrels in Quebec as the various factions jostled for position and the old fortresses of church and tradition began to crumble. Moreover, he had not expected Duplessis to die. After all his years in power, few did.
When Trudeau left Quebec at Easter 1959, he hoped to enter China once again, though he also intended to revisit old haunts and discover new vistas. Unlike his journey a decade earlier, he did not set off this time to be a vagabond student wandering the world with a knapsack. He was forty years old now and he travelled first class most of the way, staying in fine hotels such as the St. James in Paris and Hotel Mount Everest in Darjeeling. Yet, in spirit, he remained a passionate observer and a curious student. In Vietnam he noted the presence of police on every corner and despaired that the country might remain forever divided. In India he discovered a passion for politics among the people, and the historic Hindu openness to sexuality. He visited the gorgeous, erotic friezes in Kathmandu, Nepal, where the women are portrayed with their limbs spread apart and their “sex open,” and animals bear “the perfect replica of the human sexual organs of normal size.” He marvelled at the “ménages à trois” or even four. The “glorification du sexe” was part of their life, he wrote, perhaps with some envy. On one street he saw men walking with their hands on their genitals and wondered what it meant. The secular Congress government of India was trying to promote birth control, but the Catholic Trudeau questioned whether it would “modernize” the country or simply create neuroses.
Moving on to Persia, he noted how the forces opposed to the Shah detested the Americans, whose discreet presence as consultants there was considerable among the military. But he was most impressed by the changes in Israel, a country he described as a miracle. From the deserts of the Middle East, the Israelis had created a land of “greenness, of gardens, flowers, wheat fields, cotton, and corn” and a society of healthy children and well-dressed citizens. Although he detected a touch of chauvinism among the Israelis, he compared them favourably with the surrounding Arabs. He noted in his diary that he believed they were not expansionist and were willing to accept the status quo.57
Trudeau later attended an International Socialist Congress in Hamburg, Germany, where he met Moshe Sharett of Israel and Guy Mollet of France. Throughout his trip he called on prominent individuals in business, politics, and academic life. Before he left, he had asked his numerous contacts for appropriate letters of introduction. One of the most curious was a letter from Rex Billings, the general manager of Belmont Park in Montreal, who, on April 9, 1959, wrote: “The bearer of this letter, Mr. Pierre E. Trudeau, is a director of Belmont Park, and is travelling abroad on a combined business and pleasure trip. He will be visiting various amusement parks in the course of his travels, and any courtesy extended to him will be appreciated.”58 He was not able to visit China, although two prominent English Canadians who were sympathetic to Chinese Communism—Margaret Fairley, a Toronto intellectual, and James Endicott, a controversial United Church minister—attempted to obtain an invitation for him. His mother was pleased they did not succeed. She worried throughout the trip: Don’t stick “out your neck to reach China—and have your passport confiscated or get into an international mess,” she warned. “You have seen enough excitement in your life—besides you won’t be able to run as fast as you once could—remember your sore foot.”
In the end, he spent most of the time in Europe, where he bought a new Mercedes for the family. He also bought gifts: pearl earrings for Carroll Guérin, amber earrings for “Alice,” pearls for “Ada,” a silver pin for “Nicole,” an unspecified gift for Mireille G., a pin and scarf for “Kline,” and some perfume and a “pin” for Grenier, the family chauffeur. He bought a black and gold brocade jacket in Hong Kong for himself, and then spent 225 dollars or pounds for a suit made by William Yu at the celebrated Peninsula Hotel. On September 9 his mother wrote to him that the Mercedes had arrived in Montreal missing one door.59
Back home, his oldest friends were puzzled; his colleagues, often frustrated. Who is Pierre Trudeau? they asked during the political ferment of the summer and fall of 1959. Who were his friends? What did he want? His mother knew how much he wanted what she termed “success.” She resented Alec Pelletier when she told her in May how “her husband” kept Pierre informed during his absence—“not that I know of anything very important,” she added, as “my entourage is the passive kind I suppose.” In fact, Gérard Pelletier was rarely in touch with Trudeau* and seems not to have known what occurred in his personal life all that well.60
Meticulous as always, Trudeau kept a record of the letters he wrote during his long absence. It appears that he wrote ninety-two letters. Pelletier and Jacques Hébert received two each, one less than his mother and the same number as Suzette and her family. Carroll Guérin, his most frequent but far from exclusive female companion, received eleven. Numerous other women, including Nicole Morin, Micheline Legendre, Marie Sénécal, Madeleine Gobeil, and others whom he met in Europe, received a single letter. The rest of the list intrigues because it illustrates how Trudeau had forged new ties with English Canadians and Americans who were almost completely absent in his lists from the late forties and early fifties. Among them are John Stevenson of The Times, Morris Miller of Saskatchewan, Lionel Tiger of McGill University, Ron Dare of the University of British Columbia, and the historian Blair Neatby.61
Trudeau arrived home in the fall just before Maurice Duplessis’s promising successor, Paul Sauvé, unexpectedly died. He was succeeded by the unimpressive Antonio Barrette, who set off a stampede among the reformers to support the Liberal banner. Trudeau seemed at a loss as René Lévesque, journalist Pierre Laporte, constitutional lawyer Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and several reform leaders announced they were joining Jean Lesage to fight the next election. While others prepared for this stunning political change, Trudeau happily busied himself with plans for an astonishing canoe trip from Florida to Cuba. As Lesage began to electrify audiences, and René Lévesque dazzled viewers on television, Trudeau set off from Key West for Cuba with two friends. According to the Florida newspapers, Trudeau, Valmor Francoeur, and Alphonse Gagnon, a millionaire businessman from Chicoutimi, had developed “a unique method of propulsion. While one man paddles in conventional fashion, the second lies on his back and paddles with his feet. The third rests and they switch off after two-hour hitches.” Unique it surely was, but wildly dangerous too: three-foot waves drenched them thirty miles out and a shrimp boat pulled them back to the Florida shore on May Day, 1960. Although the trip had no ideological connection, it became part of the lore of Trudeau’s links with Fidel Castro, whose rebels had recently taken Havana. In interviews, Trudeau said nothing about politics, but he apparently told the Miami Herald he was thirty-nine, then dropped the age to thirty-six for the
Key West Citizen. Like the trip, it was all good fun.62
But his absence was not whimsical—it may have been deliberate. The platform of the Lesage Liberals had become increasingly neonationalist during the first months of 1960. Jean Lesage’s campaign emphasized provincial autonomy and began to speak of a special status for the province. Trudeau became very troubled as the rhetoric of nationalism, which he had so long deplored in Cité libre, became the lifeblood of the Liberal campaign, particularly in Lévesque’s television appearances. The Liberals tried to woo Marchand, but there is no evidence they asked Trudeau—the president of the Rassemblement, the coeditor of Cité libre, the author of the Democratic Manifesto, and the founder of the Union des forces démocratiques—to become a candidate. He was, perhaps, wounded—or maybe he sensed it was wise to bide his time. Certainly, he made himself difficult to contact—a small canoe in the middle of the ocean could not have been more impossible to reach—as the forces of opposition to Duplessis swelled behind Lesage and his team.
Once the Cuban canoe escapade was over, Trudeau returned to Montreal and wrote an editorial in Cité libre that appeared just before the election of Jean Lesage on June 22, 1960. It argued, grudgingly, that the Liberals were to be preferred to the Union nationale, but he persisted in claiming that his Union des forces démocratiques would have been a better alternative than the Liberal Party in the creation of a new government. He was especially scornful of the Parti social démocratique and the Civic Action League for their refusal to join actively with the Union. He debated with his young friend Madeleine Gobeil whether it would be “complicity” to support the Liberals.63