Citizen of the World

by John English

  Trudeau, like Marchand, also knew that Tommy Douglas, the pioneering socialist premier of Saskatchewan and the first NDP leader, was not likely to attract Quebec voters. Moreover, although he admired the intellect and ethics of his fellow voyageur Frank Scott, there were real differences in their approach to the Canadian Constitution and in their understanding of the role of Quebec within Canada. Trudeau was always most generous in acknowledging Scott’s influence on him, but, after analyzing some of Scott’s theories, he often reached his own, sometimes opposite conclusions. For his part, Scott, much as he respected Trudeau, did not like his acclaimed article “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec.”33 Trudeau was too much a decentralist for Scott’s very centralist taste, and his criticisms of the British tradition did not have the approval of the professor—a man of proud Anglo-Canadian heritage and bearing. In debates with Scott in which other francophones participated, Trudeau rejected nationalism in the same breath that he expressed doubts about the centralizing policies of Canada’s socialists.

  Despite these disagreements, Frank Scott and Michael Oliver had asked Trudeau to contribute an article to A Social Purpose for Canada, a book sponsored by the CCF.34 Trudeau joined the editorial committee of the project in 1958, along with Frank Scott; Eugene Forsey, the research director for the Canadian Congress of Labour; George Grube, a University of Toronto professor; and David Lewis, an official with the CCF. Like the Asbestos project, the book dragged on; Trudeau was the laggard this time, with his essay on the practice and theory of federalism finally arriving in May 1960.

  Michael Oliver, who was the editor for the volume, did not like the essay and commented harshly. He accused Trudeau of overstating his argument and of being imprecise, because he often “used” politics rather than political science. The complaint has some merit, for Trudeau’s writings are not those of the academic political scientist or university intellectual. He wrote for broader audiences and avoided the heavy apparatus of scholarship, a fact that his academic foes often criticized.35 Moreover, Oliver claimed that Trudeau’s argument in favour of decentralization was contradicted by his call for an activist state. He was especially puzzled by Trudeau’s statement that he was an “outside observer” of the CCF. In fact Trudeau was,* even though he participated in campaigns and, occasionally, held party membership cards. He regarded the CCF, correctly, as the federal party that had consistently advanced civil liberties and argued for greater economic equality. Those views he shared. Yet the party was too English, and his approach to federalism was different, particularly after the NDP began to flirt with Quebec nationalism and the “two nations” approach to Canadian federalism in 1963.36

  The NDP was one example of how, in 1961, Trudeau was generally wary of committing to any binding ties. His Cité libre articles betrayed his general discontents. He was now over forty years old—in a decade that the young tried to dominate. Most of his friends were married with children. His hair was thinning, and his worried mother told him to try the remedy of standing on his head.37 His plans for the political role he had so long desired seemed to have misfired, while others among his friends, such as René Lévesque and Paul Gérin-Lajoie, were dominating headlines as political actors and changing their society. He often felt disenchanted and at loose ends.

  In the winter of 1961 he busied himself with publication of the book on the China trip. He dithered over the invitation list to the March launch and personally wrote out the addresses of more than two hundred people he and Hébert invited. This invitation list provides insight into his connections and friendships at the time.38 The invitees were overwhelmingly francophone, with a few anglophones such as Michael Oliver of McGill University and the writer Scott Symons. Frank Scott, interestingly, was missing. René Lévesque was the major politician invited, but apparently he did not come. Thérèse Gouin Décarie and Vianney Décarie did. The old Cité libre crowd, including Réginald Boisvert, Maurice Blain, and Guy Cormier, were on the list, and most of them attended. There were new names associated with television and the cultural community. And there were also many single women.

  Carroll Guérin, the hopeful artist and occasional model who was now Trudeau’s most frequent companion, was there for the celebration. Her candour and liberal lifestyle had immediately attracted Trudeau when he met her in the late 1950s. He was encouraging her to go to Europe to study, promising to join her there in the summer. (When she went to England and applied to the London School of Economics, Trudeau asked his former Canadian classmate Robert McKenzie to assist entry. He did not, and Trudeau learned from Caroll that McKenzie disliked him.) At the book launch, Trudeau also spent time with another invitee, Madeleine Gobeil, who had matured into a brilliant young woman in the four years since Trudeau first encountered her as a teenage student at a meeting of the Rassemblement in Ottawa. Ambitious, forthright, and visibly young, her beauty, sometimes blonde, at other moments darker, impressed Trudeau’s friends whether they saw her on a beach or at the symphony.39 Their friendship developed into a romantic relationship that endured for well over a decade.*

  As the sexual revolution began in the early sixties, women were becoming a preoccupation for Trudeau, but now he shunned the intense relationships of earlier years in favour of multiple involvements. He preferred, in the jargon of the age, “to play the field” or, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of his own involvement with women, “the theatre of seduction.” His female friends complained that he still held back much of himself. One of them said his “interior” was closed, but, to Carroll, the shyness that was in itself so attractive made him “emotionally withdrawn.”*

  Trudeau still officially lived with his mother in the Outremont family home, though he kept his “pad” on Sherbrooke Street. Grace was becoming forgetful and, when he was away, their letters were fewer than they once had been. Her decline had begun, and it saddened Pierre even more than the state of politics in Quebec. They celebrated Christmas and other festive times together with Tip, Suzette, and their families, and, as always, Trudeau entranced the children with his shy charm and endless athletic tricks—jackknife dives, headstands, and dramatic leaps. Suzette still lived close to her mother and was devoted to the family.

  The summer of 1961 brought huge changes in their careers for Trudeau and his friends. A surprised Gérard Pelletier eagerly accepted an offer to become the editor of La Presse, and Jean Marchand agreed to become the head of his union, the Conféderation des syndicats nationaux (CSN). The outsiders were moving inside. While Trudeau had been in China, the rector of the Université de Montréal had called Grace, “terribly anxious” to speak with him about a teaching position there. Ironically, although he had long complained about his enforced exile from the Université de Montréal by the Catholic Church and now had the opportunity he craved, he did not really welcome it. The times had changed. The classroom, which had earlier beckoned, no longer seemed an attractive haven. Initially he turned down an appointment to the Institute on Public Law there, but then half-heartedly accepted an associate professorship at the law school itself (with a cross-appointment to the Institute)—an institution he had scorned as a student and as a lawyer. Once the arrangements were in place, he promptly left for Europe.

  Trudeau ran with the bulls in Pamplona—a mad and daring act—met Carroll Guérin in Rome, and went to the jazz festival at Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera, where he and Carroll heard the young star Ray Charles and the jazz legend Count Basie.* They stayed in a small hotel somewhere on the Mediterranean. The days were unforgettable; the parting difficult. “When you said goodbye to me this morning,” she wrote later that day, “do forgive me for asking you to go, but as you know, I felt so very sad at the thought we were going to be separated again that I did my best to avoid a scene on the street—without too much success. Funnily enough, the little maid who opened the door was in tears herself, so we happily skipped the ladida.” After giving Carroll some funds to purchase some art for him as she returned to student life, Trudeau travelled eastwards alone and v
isited the massive palace in Split, Yugoslavia, where Diocletian went to escape the declining, decadent Rome. Like Diocletian, he grumbled to others about the state of his homeland and even mused about staying in Europe.41

  Back at home, Grace Trudeau worried about her son. On September 5, 1961, she wrote: “By now your peregrinations are finished, or coming to an end—it was labor day yesterday—schools reopening—so the professors are expected to take their duties.” On September 25 she wrote again, pleading for him to come home: “Four months is a long stretch! Your Mercedes is raring to go.”42

  Obviously, Trudeau had prepared little for his classes, with the inevitable result that he had to work very hard when they began. George Radwanski later described Trudeau’s work habits in his prepolitical years: “He laboured intensely at whatever he happened to be doing and he did quite a variety of things, but—with the exception of Cité libre—he always gave the impression of doing it with one foot in and one foot out, poised to move on to something else.”43 Certainly Trudeau was not ready to settle in the classroom. A few years later he said that when he arrived at the university, he “found a rather sterile atmosphere; the terminology of the Left was now serving to conceal a single preoccupation: the separatist counter-revolution.”44

  Through the winter of 1961–62 he began to seethe as the Lesage government became more neo-nationalist and the young called the founders of Cité libre dinosaurs. Cité libre itself was not immune, as both the younger and older members of its expanded board challenged its traditional aversion to nationalism, its criticism of socialism, and its virulent opposition to separatism. In April Trudeau complained to a friend that he was often working till midnight at the university and was mostly unhappy. He wanted to be in a warm country in the sun with the sea nearby: “Truly,” he said, “everything is detestable in Quebec.”45

  That spring Peter Gzowski came to Montreal to experience the new excitement and discovered the remarkable “engaged intellectual” Pierre Trudeau. (The photograph on this book’s cover was included with the article.) In a profile of Trudeau that he published in the French- and English-language Maclean’s, he described him as an “angry young man” who directed his eloquent scorn at the separatists’ “dead causes.” Trudeau gave credit to the reforms of the Lesage government, he said, but declared how much better it would be if they had more government members like René Lévesque with energy and talent. And, Gzowski continued: “He was caught tossing snowballs at Stalin’s statue—before stoning Stalin was fashionable.” Here Trudeau becomes a turtle-necked, intellectual celebrity: a millionaire professor with an exquisite sense of fashion, a classic Mercedes sports car, an apartment on elegant Sherbrooke, and a pied-à-terre at his mother’s “large house” in Outremont. Trudeau was also an excellent athlete, orator, and “a connoisseur of fine wines and women. He created a sensation,” Gzowski continued, “when he decided to swim in the pool when it snowed at one of the meetings of the Institut des affaires publiques at Ste-Adèle.” The articles attracted considerable public attention to Trudeau in Quebec and in English Canada. He later claimed that he was offered an English CBC television position at this time, perhaps as a result of the article.46

  That same month, Trudeau published another article in Cité libre, “The New Treason of the Intellectuals”—probably the most influential essay he wrote in the 1960s. His target was direct: Quebec separatism and nationalism and their prophets, “the clerks”—the Quebec intellectuals. He took his title from a 1927 polemic by Julien Benda, who had fought the trend towards conservatism and nationalism in the 1920s in France, as Benda opposed Maurras and other authoritarians Trudeau had once admired. His anger spilled over as he made five fundamental arguments that became central to his stance in political debates in the 1960s.

  First, he wrote, “it is not the concept of nation that is retrograde; it is the idea that the nation must necessarily be sovereign.” Second, he responded to the best-selling 1961 book Pourquoi je suis séparatiste by Marcel Chaput, a federal government employee, which resulted in Chaput’s dismissal and a political fury among Quebec nationalists. Chaput, Trudeau argued, was dead wrong in suggesting that the experience of decolonization in Africa and Asia had relevance for Quebec. Chaput himself had admitted that “French Canada enjoys rights these people never did.” Many of these newly independent states were poly-ethnic, as was Canada. They were not homogeneous nations but multi-ethnic countries where minorities dreamed of the rights French-speaking Canadians had long possessed. Woodrow Wilson’s “Principle of Nationality,” just like the decolonization movement itself, had never been intended to create a wave of nationalist secessions.

  Third, Trudeau continued, for most of history there had been no nations; however, since the rise of the nation-states in the previous two hundred years, the world had witnessed “the most devastating wars, the worst atrocities, and the most degrading collective hatred.” There would be no end to wars “until in some fashion the nation ceases to be the basis of the state.” Fourth, history taught that “to insist that a particular nationality must have complete sovereign power is to pursue a self-destructive end … every national minority will find, at the very moment of liberation, a new minority within its bosom which in turn must be allowed the right to demand its freedom.” Fifth, Anglo-Canadians “have been strong by virtue of our weakness,” not only in Ottawa but also in Quebec City. In both places, the politicians had been marked by political cynicism and the political system by “the pestilence of corruption.” Had English-speaking Canadians “applied themselves to learning French with a quarter the diligence they have shown in refusing to do so, Canada would have been effectively bilingual long ago.”

  Too much energy had therefore been wasted on worthless quarrels. The “treason of the intellectuals” arose from their propensity to fight such quarrels and to waste hours of each day discussing separatism. These discussions amounted to no more than an aimless flapping of the arms in the wind. Nationalism in Quebec was reactionary. In a battle, the right-wing nationalists, from the village notary through the small businessman to the members of the Ordre de Jacques Cartier, would always triumph over the new left-wing nationalists, who dreamed of nationalizing and using the state to secure benefits for the emerging French-Canadian bourgeoisie. The existing Canadian Constitution already gave full scope to Chaput, or the young separatists, to carry out the reforms they wanted and to have the “inspiration” they craved. To a young poet who had said that a new state of Quebec would make him “capable of doing great things,” Trudeau replied: “If he fails to find within himself, in the world about him and in the stars above, the dignity, pride and other well-springs of poetry, I wonder why and how he will find them in a ‘free’ Quebec.”

  The “nation” guards a heritage, he continued; it does so principally through a Constitution and a federal system that protect a pluralistic and “poly-ethnic society.” Those matters with “ethnic” relevance—education, language, property, and civil rights—were already within the power of the province of Quebec under the existing Constitution. So, he concluded, “French Canadians have all the powers they need to make Quebec a political society affording due respect for nationalist aspirations and at the same time giving unprecedented scope for human potential in the broadest sense.”47

  These arguments remained at the core of Trudeau’s response to Quebec separatism and neo-nationalism for the next three decades. Some items changed: he moved away, for example, from his status quo approach to the Constitution. But most fundamentals—bilingualism, a reverence for the role of law, more franco-phone presence in Ottawa, a suspicion of nationalism attached to economic policies, and a stronger state at provincial and federal levels—endured in his speeches, his writings, and his actions. In the spring of 1962 he reiterated them publicly in a debate among André Laurendeau, René Lévesque, Frank Scott, and Jean-Jacques Bertrand, the Union nationale politician and future premier. When Bertrand asked whether Trudeau opposed a project to open up the Constitution and cr
eate a “special status” for Quebec, Trudeau answered quickly and unambiguously, “Yes.” He believed that the Constitution should be patriated, but he opposed any special status for Quebec that would diminish the other provinces and ultimately lead to the break-up of the federation. In his interview with Peter Gzowski he was scathing: “A nation or people has only so much intellectual energy to spend on a revolution. If the intellectual energy of French Canada is spent on such a futile and foolish cause as separatism, the revolution that is just beginning here can never be brought about.”48

  Trudeau’s argument that nationalism reflects bourgeois aspirations at the expense of broader working-class economic interests developed partly from conversations with two young brothers, the sociologist Raymond Breton and the economist Albert Breton—ideas they went on to present in Cité libre and elsewhere. Trudeau became particularly attracted to their claim that the new Quebec must focus not on nationalist diversions but on “real” solutions to economic problems—reforms that would improve the lot of all, and not the bourgeois elite alone.

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  Trudeau’s anger was real, and his ideas had become more focused. That focus intensified in the course of regular debates that began in the fall of 1961 when René Lévesque, now minister of natural resources in the Lesage government, asked André Laurendeau to organize a group to meet with him every second Friday over the winter (which in Montreal stretches from October into May). Laurendeau in turn invited Jean Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, and Trudeau. Pelletier’s Westmount home was the usual meeting place; there, dinner was casual and incidental to the conversation. Trudeau and Marchand usually departed first and left the voluble Lévesque and Laurendeau arguing long into the smoke-filled night. The meetings began with René Lévesque describing events that had occurred during the previous two weeks in Quebec City. Trudeau would await his moment, then pounce on the errors in the stream of consciousness that flowed from Lévesque.