Citizen of the World

by John English

  On June 22 Lesage won a surprisingly narrow victory over the battered Union nationale. It was, and remains, a landmark in the recent history of Quebec, one that opened dams that had been long closed. Unlike most of his colleagues and friends, Trudeau was not taken at the flood.

  * Unfortunately, Trudeau did not keep detailed notebooks in the fifties as he had on earlier travels. Nevertheless, his brief notes show that he used travel to develop his political views. In Europe in the fall of 1951, he draws the lesson from the study of different party systems that bureaucrats should be more effective and concludes that Quebec’s greatest need is an independent and competent public service. He did keep a laundry list of his extended 1951–52 travels that broke down items into nine fascinating categories: cities, architecture, adventure, national traits, theatre, music, art, antiquities, and scenery. The architecture category was brief and peculiar: Italy’s elegant Villa d’Este and Le Corbusier’s work in Moscow and Paris. More interesting was music: Der Rosenkavalier at the Berlin Opera, Pablo Casals at the Prado, a Sudanese ensemble in the desert near Khartoum, and pygmy drums in the Congo. Adventure was typical and amusing: “sleeping outdoors in equatorial forest and raging baboons; tracking elephants & buffaloes; riots in Cairo; swimming [in the] Bosphorus; and contradicting Politbureau.” Voyage 1951–1952, TP, vol.12, file 4.

  * Falardeau wrote a long letter to Scott saying he had asked Trudeau to “make more accurate and historically objective his references to P. Lévesque and to the Faculty of Social Sciences [at Laval]” and to “tone down the aggravating accent of his statements concerning such people as M. Minville etc.” Scott and Falardeau both emphasized editorial perfection because of the difficulty they had experienced in finding a publisher, and because they expected the book to be severely criticized. When it was finally finished, Falardeau wrote to Trudeau that they should learn important lessons from the whole affair: “That would require another book in itself.” Falardeau to Scott, Sept. 7, 1955; and Falardeau to Trudeau, July 27, 1955, and April 13, 1956, TP, vol. 23, file 16.

  * So do the comments of CCF activist Thérèse Casgrain, who wrote to Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas on April 16, 1955, asking if “Pierre Trudeau, whom you have met and who is one of our extremely promising young Canadians,” could attend the federal-provincial conference with the Saskatchewan delegation. Saskatchewan Archives, Douglas Papers, collection number 33.1, vol. 671.

  * Gérard Pelletier asked Jean Marchand, who had attended Laval, where Father Lévesque was establishing a school of social science, what he had learned in university: “He gave me the shortest possible answer: ‘Nothing.’” For his part, Pelletier described his college education as “rather anemic.” Gérard Pelletier, Years of Impatience, 1950–1960, trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1984), 75.

  * In his study of race and the Canadian courts, James Walker has clearly shown that Quebec was not out of step with other Canadian jurisdictions in restrictions on the rights of Asians, Jews, and Blacks. In 1954, when the federal government revised the Immigration Act, Minister of Finance Walter Harris explained that “the racial background of our people would be maintained within reasonable balance; and … we would avoid an influx of persons whose viewpoint differed substantially from that of the average, respectable, God-fearing Canadian.” The Globe and Mail thought Harris went too far but, revealingly, dissented weakly: Who are we being protected from, it asked, “Arabs, Zulus, or what? No one seriously proposed taking immigrants from any part of the world save Western Europe.” Quoted in James Walker, “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1997), 248.

  * The writer Jean Le Moyne was invited to one meeting with eighteen participants in Charles Lussier’s basement. “In the dim light I could see two small bottles of wine at each end and a Dominican priest, a man both austere and paternalistic, sitting in their midst … The discussion was extremely mature but it was so solemn and ponderous I wanted to escape. Our meetings [at Le Relève] were very different. We would have a wonderful dinner with much laughter and talk about books. The end of the evening would find us under the table replete with good wine and great ideas. I was thinking about this [contrast] when the Dominican suddenly asked me where I was coming from, and I answered him facetiously, ‘From under the table, Father.’ Nobody knew what I was talking about, of course, but if they had known, I had the feeling they wouldn’t have laughed.” Jean Le Moyne, quoted in Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, vol. 1: The Magnificent Obsession (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 64–65.

  * Trudeau regularly jousted with Laurendeau and Le Devoir. In 1957 he was invited to a conference of “Amis du Devoir” and asked to be a keynote speaker. He began by citing André Gide’s response to the question, Who is the greatest French poet? “Hugo, hélas!” If one were asked what is the best French newspaper in Canada, he continued, the answer should be “Le Devoir, hélas!” Le Devoir, Feb. 4, 1957.

  * A year later, Trudeau debated the question on radio and argued that the grants were “against the constitution and the spirit of federalism.” TP, vol. 25, file 4.

  * Historian Michael Behiels was scathing in his criticism: “The procedural strategy had a bad taste of boy scout amateurism and a large dose of political naïveté. When a public manifesto was signed finally by twenty-one ‘eminent’ political personalities in April 1959, only one Liberal, Marc Brière, endorsed the document, and he had not been mandated by the party.” See his Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), 254.

  * A few weeks later Trudeau’s garrulous behaviour caused one real loss. According to Nouvelles illustrées on December 27, 1958, Trudeau was an “excellent combatant” in a judo competition, but he was disqualified because he “talked too much”—a characteristic not expected of a brown belt in judo.

  * Scott’s biographer Sandra Djwa says, correctly, that Scott had a considerable influence on Trudeau. She also suggests that Scott’s use of the term “just society” was the source for Trudeau’s later political slogan. She admits, however, that tracing the influence is difficult. She points out that in his memoirs, Trudeau refers to T.H. Green and Emmanuel Mounier as important influences in the forties but does not mention Scott. Moreover, she continues, “There is no reference to Scott’s role in Quebec in the Memoirs, nor to their joint Mackenzie River trip. Scott’s name appears only once in a brief paragraph on the CCF.” Although Trudeau admired Scott, his papers suggest that Scott’s influence was perhaps more personal than intellectual. Sandra Djwa, “‘Nothing by halves’: F.R. Scott,” Journal of Canadian Studies 34 (winter 1999–2000), 52–69.

  * In his memoirs, Pelletier says that Trudeau “barely read daily papers.” Yet his papers are crammed with clippings from all the major newspapers, and he found even obscure references to himself in the tabloid press.

  CHAPTER 8

  A DIFFERENT TURN

  I’m confident French Canadians will once again miss the turn,” Pierre Trudeau wrote in Le Devoir at the beginning of 1960, the year of Quebec’s historic “Quiet Revolution.” “At least, they’ll miss it if their political authorities continue to cultivate mediocrity, if their ecclesiastic authorities continue to fear progress, and if their university authorities continue to scorn knowledge.”1 Many in Quebec and elsewhere did miss the turn that, in the sixties, became a social and political revolution in the West. The decade began in North America with leaders who had been born in the nineteenth century. Canada’s John Diefenbaker adored the monarchy, disdained alcohol, spoke fractured French, had served in the First World War, and was formed by the devastation of the Great Depression. President Dwight Eisenhower, whom he greatly admired, was, at seventy, older than Diefenbaker but, like Americans generally at that time, more modern in his tastes and demeanour. Yet both seemed old in 1960 as the American Democratic candidate for the presidency, John Kennedy, began his succes
sful campaign, at the age of forty-two, with a call to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans who faced new challenges and dreamed new dreams.

  Montreal had shared the remarkable prosperity enjoyed in this continent during the postwar years. Historian Paul-André Linteau ranks the period with the 1850s and the beginning of the twentieth century as the most prosperous in the city’s history. And prosperity brought its physical and cultural rewards, such as the boulevard Métropolitain that channelled the expressway to the city’s heart and allowed Trudeau’s Mercedes to change lanes swiftly as he sped southwards to a party at Frank Scott’s summer home in the Townships, or northwards to the sophisticated resorts of the Laurentians. The number of automobiles in Montreal more than quadrupled from 229,000 vehicles after the war to over a million in 1960—far beyond the wildest dreams of Charles Trudeau with his gas stations in the twenties. With its skyscrapers culminating in the symbolic cruciform of Place Ville Marie in 1962, Montreal seemed a thoroughly North American and modern city.

  In the clubs of the city centre, Trudeau saw Oscar Peterson emerge as the finest jazz pianist of his age and Félix Leclerc as one of the great chansonniers. After the nationalist riot of 1955, when the National Hockey League commissioner suspended the local hero Maurice “the Rocket” Richard, the Montreal Canadiens inspired francophone pride by winning five consecutive Stanley Cups. By this time Trudeau cared less about hockey, which he had once played well, than about culture, but here, too, a new spirit appeared, with the creation at the end of the fifties of Gratien Gélinas’s Comédie-Canadienne, a host of smaller theatres, and Ludmilla Chiriaeff’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. Trudeau no longer had to rely on touring companies to bring him ballet, the art he treasured most. But prosperity assured that the best touring companies came as well, and he heard the great Maria Callas and the New York Metropolitan Opera, which performed in Montreal five times between 1952 and 1958.2

  Trudeau savoured these changes, just as he did the new restaurants where he and his various dates—he seems to have had several companions at this time—enjoyed ever finer cuisine and wines.* Montreal was the international city he had dreamed it might be in the thirties. Yet there is a wistfulness to his tone at the time, a sense that the heavy hand of the past had not lifted after Duplessis’s death in September 1959. He feared that Quebec would miss the turn essential to its competing successfully in the North American economy and realizing its full human potential, if its francophone universities remained immersed in their sacramental heritage and if its political debates shunned the cosmopolitan flavour that marked other Western capitals at the beginning of the sixties. His own efforts to open the political system through the development of new political groupings had won little success, and that failure no doubt affected his vision as he watched the real changes occurring about him.

  Trudeau, of course, was not alone in underestimating the changes in Quebec that had occurred in the fifties. By 1960 his voice was heard in the debates in Le Devoir, on television news programs, and in public meetings, especially those organized by the Institut canadien des affaires publiques. He also became a familiar figure at meetings where Laval or Montréal students protested against the meagre provincial government support for the universities, and the young filled the admittedly small ranks of the Rassemblement as well. At his best in debate, his scintillating, quick wit scored with an astonishing range of literary, philosophical, and exotic allusions. He was particularly active in public debates on civil liberties issues, which often focused on the use of an identity card. Trudeau strongly opposed the idea.3

  Despite all his political activity, his writing, his networking of the previous decade, Trudeau remained an outsider. He was both “the most fascinating and disappointing intellectual of the 1950s” in Quebec, according to the Laval University professor Léon Dion. There was a “bewitching magnetism” around him, an envy of his intellectual and physical prowess, and admiration for “his charm and his wealth. He had the reputation of possessing the most cultivated and the most progressive spirit of the times.”4 None of his contemporaries offered more, even though some, like René Lévesque, were better known. However, he chose to walk away when the Liberal troops stormed the barricades, and he was not a player in what Lévesque dubbed the “spring cleaning of the century” that began in June 1960. Lévesque was there with Jean Lesage as he assembled his team, took office, and began to sweep away the barriers to speech, thought, and social change. As others took up the brooms Trudeau had so long advocated, he, strangely, remained at the sidelines.

  But was it so strange? By all accounts, Trudeau’s feelings and his prospects were uncertain at this critical moment. Although Lévesque later claimed that Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier, and Jean Marchand all turned down the chance to become candidates in the 1960 election (Marchand certainly said no to Jean Lesage, who considered the celebrated labour leader a prize candidate), Lévesque’s biographer Pierre Godin argues convincingly that Pelletier and Trudeau were not even asked. At the time, Trudeau welcomed Lévesque’s last-minute decision to enter politics and, after the Liberal victory, his appointment to the Cabinet. Later, he admitted he was envious that Lévesque had “made a jump into politics at a time when it was crucial.” “I felt a bit sorry for myself,” he said, “because I’d never be asked to get into politics … I was against the party he had joined.” But he also told Lévesque’s Liberal Cabinet colleague Paul Gérin-Lajoie that he was “lucky” to have “Liberal beliefs”: “This permits you to get into politics,” he said. For his own part, a wistful Trudeau believed he “would always be on the outside writing articles about what the politicians should be doing and weren’t.” It was the price he paid for trying to create viable new parties—the Rassemblement and the Union des forces démocratiques—and for condemning vigorously the traditional political parties. Still, for all his talk, he had never doubted that he should be on the inside. He had told a union meeting in 1957, for instance, that “it was much better to have men standing up in the legislature in Quebec than marching on it.” But when the reformers finally took their place on the front benches in 1960, a disappointed Trudeau wasn’t there.5

  Yet bliss it was in that summer of 1960 to be alive, democratic, and liberal, even if not Liberal, in Quebec. Despite Trudeau’s differences with the leaders of the new regime, he shared with them “a common understanding on a range of subjects such as the urgency for the modernization of Quebec or the sad awareness of the loss created by 25 years of Duplessisism in the province.”6 Trudeau’s post-election article in Cité libre treated the Lesage election as heaven-sent—his mood contrasting sharply with his previous hesitations about the election and the Lesage Liberals. “We must first salute those who delivered us from the scourge of the Union nationale,” he wrote. “It is the Liberal Party and none other which waged the decisive battle for our liberation, and it is to them that today I doff my hat.” In particular, he saluted “the incorruptible Mr. Lapalme and … the indefatigable Mr. Lesage,” who had built piece by piece an army from a group that, then years before, had only eight members in the legislature.7

  But Georges-Émile Lapalme and Jean Lesage did not doff their hats to Trudeau for helping to build the army that triumphed in June 1960. In his superb memoirs of his political career, Lapalme dismissed the role of Cité libre in defeating Duplessis. And the former premier, had he been alive in 1960, would surely have agreed. The reasons behind their grudging reservations were all too clear in that same article Trudeau published immediately after their election victory. Some of the new Liberal politicians had only recently begun to oppose the Union nationale, he said, and he still had doubts about the past, present, and future of the Quebec Liberal Party:

  For sixteen years, the Province has wallowed under an incompetent, tyrannical, and reactionary government. This regime, resting on lucre, ambition, and a fondness for the arbitrary, would not have been possible, however, without the cowardice and complacency of almost all those exercising authority, commanding in
fluence, or leading public opinion …

  Whether chancellor of a university, principal of a school, union leader, director of a professional corps, head of a company, militant nationalist, or administrator of any institution, each used the particular arrangement he had come to with the power of government as a pretext to justify not denouncing this power when it systematically harmed the common good in the domain for which each was responsible: industrial relations, natural resources, well-ordered economic development, civic honour, respect of intelligence, education, autonomy, justice, and democracy.

  Trudeau also defended his absence from the political front ranks in his article. He disingenuously omitted mention of his central role in the formation and leadership of the Union des forces démocratiques. He pointed to the close results in many constituencies as well as Lesage’s narrow victory. He argued, accordingly, that if all anti-Duplessis forces had united behind a coalition such as the Union, the majority would have been larger and the mandate for change stronger. He criticized the socialist party—the Parti social démocratique (PSD)—which had joined the Liberals in refusing to rally behind his Union, and claimed that the dismal results it received were deserved. In Trudeau’s view, the PSD would “probably disappear from the provincial scene for a long time.” In this judgment he was correct. Finally, he pointed out that the Liberals had only recently united effectively against Duplessis: in the past, under the domination of Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, they had acquiesced too often to Duplessis’s anti-labour policies, on the one hand, and Ottawa’s centralization, on the other. While the Liberals had remained in thrall to the forces of reaction, others had fought for justice “with vehemence, courage, and persistence.”8 In other words, he claimed, the editors and authors of Cité libre had been on the thin front lines when the Union nationale was intimidating almost all the others. Trudeau’s argument fundamentally and correctly asserted that the party politicians had determined the outcome in the present, but that the thinkers and the students, the ones who cared about Cité libre, had been equally important in what French historians call the longue durée.