by John English
On June 30 Trudeau appealed, although he agreed that the spirit of Bishop Pelletier’s reply reflected certain papal encyclicals. When he received no apology, he wrote again on August 26. Pelletier quickly replied on September 3 and authorized Trudeau to go ahead with a suit in civil court. But it was too late. Quebec libel law required that any action had to proceed within three months of publication. The Pelletier letter had arrived precisely at the point when the legal remedies were exhausted.
A later debate on the issue took place in the pages of Cité libre and the conservative Catholic Notre Temps, in which “Jean-Paul Poitras” said that Trudeau had not needed to turn to canon law but could have gone directly to the courts. In a reply entitled “The Inconvenience of Being Catholic,” Trudeau denounced Poitras for his ignorance, adding wryly that “for a long time, Notre Temps has accused Cité libre and its editors of being bad sons of the Church. Today Notre Temps and M. Poitras accuse me of holding the laws of the Church in too high regard.”20
By the summer of 1961, however, when Trudeau wrote this attack on clericalism and the church’s conservatism, he was tilting at windmills. The debate belonged to the past, not to the intense present of Quebec after June 1960. What remains remarkable is the time he spent on the matter when so much else of political significance was developing in Quebec. The denunciations of the “Soviet sympathies” of his LSE mentor Harold Laski, the Union nationale’s use of the Padlock Law, and the wild exaggerations of the “menace” of Communism all played a part in his attitude, as did, perhaps, his long-forgotten thesis on the reconciliation of Communism and Catholicism. Trudeau rightly despised this McCarthyism of the North, especially when the church was involved. These experiences and this attitude formed part of the baggage he carried to China.
A second explanation for the authors’ naïveté in their reaction to China lies in Trudeau’s understanding of international politics, an area where Harold Laski, Emmanuel Mounier, and the eminent French newspaper Le Monde had all had considerable influence on him. He believed, like many other intellectuals of the time, that, in the nuclear age, all possible effort should be made to break down the differences between the East and the West. André Laurendeau and Le Devoir shared his views, as did Gérard Pelletier, particularly in the late fifties and early sixties when the superpowers began testing ever more potent hydrogen weapons and the Western anti-nuclear movement grew rapidly. On June 24, 1961, he clipped a piece from Le Devoir in which his former fiancée Thérèse Gouin, by then a highly regarded academic psychologist, wrote of the terror she felt for the fate of her children in the thermonuclear age. Trudeau shared Thérèse’s fears, and his beliefs bonded him to the young, a tie he cherished. But it was not only the young: Maryon Pearson, Lester Pearson’s wife, boldly joined the Canadian Voice of Women, an organization whose rallying call at the time was opposition to nuclear weapons. In those anxiety-filled times, Trudeau, like many of his students, wore a peace symbol on his lapel.
Furthermore, Trudeau reflected contemporary social science in its belief that, especially in recently decolonized countries, nations could achieve economic gains more quickly by central planning than by democratic means. He concluded a CBC “post-news talk” on Valentine’s Day with some reservations, saying that what he saw in China “was not the neat economic planning of our textbooks,” and he spoke of the “bottlenecks” that planning caused. But, he concluded, “only a fool would fail to see that … it was the clumsy awakening of what in years to come … may turn out to be the world’s most powerful industrial giant.”
For many observers in the late 1950s, the Soviets seemed to have grown economically at rates far beyond that of the United States and Canada. They had launched the first earth satellite and, according to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign, had managed to produce far more missiles than the United States had done. In a world where missiles counted, the Soviets had apparently become the greatest military power. China, for its part, seemed much superior at the time to its obvious democratic comparison, India, in terms of literacy, economic growth, and infant mortality. Eminent social scientists such as Samuel Huntington noticed the results and concluded that democracy might not be the best path for the newly independent African and Asian states to follow.
In 1959 Michael Oliver, the McGill professor and socialist activist, had asked Trudeau to comment on an article by George Grant, the well-known Canadian political philosopher. Grant was critical of contemporary capitalism but argued that social priorities were “more advanced” in North America than in the Soviet Union. Trudeau placed a question mark beside that claim, though he agreed with Grant that North American capitalism did not produce the “right services”—there were too many cars and garages and not enough classrooms.21 Trudeau was willing to give the Soviets, the Chinese, and, later, the Cubans much credit for getting their “social priorities” correct. While acknowledging the limitations on civic rights in these authoritarian societies, he emphasized their social achievements, especially when others in the church and in Quebec and Canadian politics so vigorously denied them.
Finally, Trudeau and Hébert were more troubled about the intellectual and cultural development in China than their critics suggested. After one of the endless “factory” tours where they saw how “Soviet experts” had helped production—as an official delegation they had no choice but to go where their hosts took them to showcase the Chinese accomplishments—the Canadians longed
to dream awhile before the tomb of an emperor, or the tranquil Buddha of some pagoda lost in the mountains. But that’s the past, and Mr. Hou, like all the Mr. Hous in China, thinks only of the present, dreams only of the future. When we ask our hosts to identify some modern building, they reply enthusiastically: “It’s a hospital, it’s a library—built after the Liberation.”
“And that lovely temple, on that little hill over there?”
“I don’t know—some temple …”
“Buddhist?”
“Perhaps.”
It doesn’t interest them.22
The earnestness and ignorance of the Chinese universities also bothered them: “Trudeau asks the economists if they know some of the Western economists who have studied socialist economics: Schumpeter and Lerner, for instance, or even the Polish economist Lange? They don’t know them.” The Canadians “can’t help wondering” if the students “ever take time for a little fun.” Apparently they don’t, and if a foreign student from a “brother” Marxist country is caught redhanded in a “harmless flirtation,” he will be considered a “degenerate, a bad Marxist,” and sent home. As one who flirted constantly, Trudeau’s condemnation was severe!23
When Trudeau returned home from China in November 1960, he found that Quebec’s politics and classrooms were becoming very different from those he had excoriated in the fifties. His fears that the Lesage government would be hesitant and too beholden to traditional political interests had been unwarranted. The “team of thunder,” as the Liberals called their government, moved forward with breathtaking speed as it secularized education, began to redefine social security, and even considered an international role for Quebec. René Lévesque became a symbol of this dynamism and, increasingly, its nationalism. The Catholic Church reeled from the impact of change, and its priests began to notice that the faithful now came much less often to mass. Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, as he had now been promoted, struggled to meet the forces of modernization. He implored Le Devoir not to break its historical link with the Roman Catholic Church and agreed to restrict church interference in the universities—a decision that opened academic positions to church critics such as Marcel Rioux and, of course, Pierre Trudeau. In Trudeau’s case, the cardinal personally intervened to remove the ban, and Vianney Décarie played a major part in securing a position for his wife’s great admirer.24
In January 1961—a decade after the historic meeting between Léger, Trudeau, and Pelletier over Trudeau’s article questioning the “divine right” of priests—the cardinal once
again invited them in for a discussion—this time to his home in Lachine. It was, Pelletier recalled, “a friendly encounter”—a mood that would colour their relationship through the momentous Vatican II reform process and in many other meetings until 1967. Then Léger, the prince of the Quebec church, left his province for Cameroon, to become once again a simple parish priest.25
What had happened in Quebec was that the positions of Pelletier and Trudeau, on the one hand, and the cardinal, on the other, had converged. True, there were still some flourishes from the past, as in Trudeau’s battle with the bishop of Trois-Rivières. Another occurred when Jean-Paul Desbiens anonymously published Les insolences de frère Untel, a strong condemnation of Catholic education in Quebec. André Laurendeau wrote the preface and, in the fall of 1960, he received a severe rebuke from Cardinal Léger for his efforts. The book sold an astonishing 150,000 copies, but, by then, Desbiens had been excommunicated by the church. Here was a cause Trudeau and his colleagues could champion, as in the dark days of the fifties, and Cité libre gave Desbiens its “prix de la liberté” to express its solidarity with him.26
Unlike many of their now openly agnostic or atheist colleagues, however, Trudeau and Pelletier remained believers. Pelletier admitted as early as October 1960 that he had not realized how weak the Quebec church had become behind its imposing physical structures and powerful traditions. In Cité libre, where Quebec Catholic ways were often deplored, Pelletier lamented that “we are proceeding, I believe, towards a spiritual void and a religion without a soul similar to North American Protestantism.” Pelletier and Trudeau were not admirers of Abbé Groulx, but they shared his opinion, to some degree, that the spiritual aridity of the Quiet Revolution had created a confusion of ideas and an aggressive secularism.27
Trudeau also shared with Pelletier a growing admiration for the reform movement in the Roman Catholic Church that began with the election of Pope John XXIII in 1958.28 The historic encyclical Mater et Magistra, issued on May 15, 1961, reflected many of the intellectual streams, including personalism, which had animated the first meetings between Pelletier and Trudeau as young men in postwar Paris. The Pope’s own rhetoric, including his references to the importance of the individual within society and, above all, his call to “open the windows” of Catholicism to the world, bore a strong resemblance to Trudeau’s beliefs and writing. And Trudeau found little humour in the mocking of the church that became increasingly common in Quebec in the sixties. However, it was not the blasphemy of the artist or the young, with whom he was otherwise closely allied in spirit and style and concern, that perturbed him most during the winter of 1960–61: it was the increasingly assertive nationalism of Quebec political debate, a nationalism that he came to regard as a substitute for the religious zealotry of the past.
Since its November 1960 reorganization under Jacques Hébert, Cité libre had become a monthly publication. It had been refinanced with seventy-five shareholders and had created a large administrative committee, including an auditor and an archivist. The larger grouping meant, of course, greater diversity of views. Trudeau and Pelletier, as editors, were troubled as neo-nationalists and separatists on the committee became increasingly vocal and, they believed, too influential.
Curious about what the young thought, they organized a gathering of the “friends” of Cité libre at the Université de Montréal on a Saturday morning in the fall that year. The crowd looked much different from those of earlier days. The suits were few, the women far more numerous, beards were everywhere, and separatist slogans were on the notice boards. The students challenged directly, showed little regard for formalities, and clearly demonstrated that the sixties belonged to the young and that those over forty, like Trudeau, would have to prove themselves before they got any respect. His own turtlenecks, sandals, open shirts, and casual jackets no longer seemed bohemian and shocking—even though he often asked his young companion, Madeleine Gobeil, for sartorial advice.29 There, at the university, Pelletier immediately “noticed the first unequivocal signs of a nationalist renaissance among our juniors.” One young woman heckled him and accused Cité libre of disregarding French culture in Quebec. He replied that the journal had been culturally nationalist from its first issue but had rejected political nationalism as retrogressive.
Pelletier and Trudeau responded quickly to the charges against them in the pages of Cité libre and elsewhere. After he returned from a holiday in Europe, Trudeau drafted an article on nationalist alienation, “L’aliénation nationaliste,” which appeared in March 1961 as the lead. He began by declaring that the journal had always displayed a tendency to consider Quebec nationalists as alienated. He replied, at least implicitly, to the young woman at the university that memorable Saturday morning:
The friends of Cité libre were suffering—as much as anyone else, I guess—from the humiliations which afflicted our ethnic group. But as great as the external attack on our rights may have been, still greater was our own incapacity to exercise those rights. For example, the contempt shown by “les Anglais” for the French language never seemed to rival either in extent or in stupidity that very contempt shown by our own people in speaking and teaching French in such an abominable way! Or again, the violations of educational rights of French Canadians in other provinces never seemed as blameworthy or odious as the narrow-mindedness, incompetence, and lack of foresight that have always characterized education policy in the province of Quebec, where our rights were all nevertheless respected. The same could be said for areas where we claimed we were being wronged: religion, finance, elections, officialdom and so forth.
Trudeau went on to castigate separatists who, in the past, “called on the people for acts of heroism … on the very people who did not even have the courage to stop reading American comics or to go see French movies.” Separatists wanted to close the borders and hand back power to the same elites who were responsible for the “abject state from which separatists were boldly offering to free us.” The young separatists might “make fun of the cowards at Cité libre” who would not endorse separatism or extreme nationalism. Yet it was they who were unrealistic in not recognizing that they were aligning themselves with the most conservative “interests in the heart of the French-Canadian community.” Separatism and neo-nationalism would close off that community, cut off the breath of true freedom. In a conclusion that became a later slogan, Trudeau declared ringingly: “Open up the borders, our people are suffocating to death.”30
In the spring and summer of 1961 the atmosphere in Quebec and in Canada worried Trudeau, especially the attraction of separatism to the young. Even his most frequent female companion, Carroll Guérin, wrote to him: “What do you think of the separatist motion? Do you think it will eventually succeed. You probably will disagree, but I have a feeling that it might—so necessary is it for the French Canadians to find an identity and so strong is their conviction that this identity cannot exist interspersed with the English factor.” Disagree they did, but on nuclear disarmament they shared the view that it was the greatest problem of all. The times might be exciting, but crisis loomed close by.
In Ottawa, John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives were beginning to stumble badly, and they seemed particularly inept in facing the challenge of the new Quebec Liberal government. Diefenbaker’s stunning electoral victory in 1958 (in which he won 208 seats, the Liberals 48, and the CCF 8) had forced the other parties to serious reconsideration of their own position. The Liberals began a policy review in 1960 in which Maurice Lamontagne played a major part and Jean Marchand a minor one.
Trudeau, however, was not drawn to those discussions; his ties on the federal level were far closer to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which had now decided to reestablish itself as the New Democratic Party. Trudeau’s ties with English Canada politically were almost exclusively with CCF intellectuals, notably Frank Scott, Eugene Forsey, Michael Oliver, and, in the 1960s, the philosopher Charles Taylor. He developed further links after he met the historian Ramsay Cook at
a friend’s wedding, and Cook soon invited him to contribute to the CCF-leaning Canadian Forum. The purpose in creating the NDP was to connect the party more closely with organized labour, an objective Trudeau had supported in both the Quebec and the Canadian context throughout the fifties. Yet, when that merger occurred, he hesitated to make an open commitment to the new socialist party.31
Jean Marchand later claimed that he had dissuaded Trudeau from this tie in the fifties because there were more immediate problems, such as “to get rid of Duplessis.” After Maurice Duplessis fell and the CCF transformed itself into the more urban NDP, Marchand said it became a problem of conscience for them. Normally, he and Trudeau, as labour champions on the left, would support the CCF-NDP, but, he explained: “It’s useless to start building a party with your neighbour and say, ‘Well, maybe someday in twenty or twenty-five years we’ll have a good party representing exactly our ideologies.’ We thought that the NDP could not achieve power even if we had joined the party because a large portion of Quebec would have been opposed to us.” He was pragmatic—and no doubt correct.32