by John English
In his study of memory and democracy in Quebec, social critic Joseph-Yvon Thériault insists that Trudeau, as an intellectual and a politician, must be understood in the context of Lord Durham’s famous report that described two different “nations” in the 1830s. Of Trudeau, he wrote, “His thought as much as his political deeds is structured as a critique and a transcendence of French-Canadian nationalism.” In this respect, Pierre Trudeau was very much “a Quebec man of his generation.” Like Durham, he identified the quarrel of the French-Canadian people as “a debate about principles between the defence of nationality and liberal values.” He believed that the “defence of nationality” had prevented the development of “a true political pluralism” among French Canadians.13
In the 1960s Trudeau’s thinking on nationalism and politics was increasingly framed in the language and concepts of political science, although he resisted academic and intellectual strait-jackets. He became even more interested in what a new friend, the French journalist Claude Julien, termed “the American challenge”—and, indeed, there were echoes of Julien and American social science in the call for functional politics that Trudeau and several other Montreal intellectuals issued in 1964. Julien, a foreign correspondent for Le Monde who had been educated at Notre Dame University in Indiana, believed that the technological achievements of contemporary America threatened to leave Europe a fading, second-class continent. On his frequent trips to Paris, Trudeau visited Julien, who—like him, a Catholic on the left—kept wondering what the leftist and statist doctrines would mean for economic progress.
In his attack on the “separatist counter-revolutionaries” that year, Trudeau lamented the price the young in Quebec had paid for ignoring “the sciences and the techniques of the day: automation, cybernetics, nuclear science, economic planning, and whatnot else.” Instead of facing the future, a few built bombs, others wrote revolutionary poetry, and the world moved past them. The poets, painters, authors, and songwriters were once again raising the banners of revolution in the coffee houses, the clubs, the streets, and in literary reviews, but, Trudeau believed, many of the younger generation were dangerously closing both their borders and their minds. While he welcomed the progressive reforms of Vatican II, the youth around him mostly ignored the changes and rejected religion itself in favour of alternative secular substitutes.
To get a better perspective on what was happening, Trudeau sought out new voices. The University of Montreal economist Albert Breton shared the same concerns as he and Julien did. They had lunch almost every week in a campus restaurant, where Trudeau revealed a “sweet tooth” along with his extraordinary knowledge of federalism. He could quote The Federalist Papers verbatim. Breton, who went on to become one of the world’s leading economists in the study of federalism, claims that he “first learned about federalism from [Trudeau] during those lunches.” Trudeau began to attract other young intellectuals—such as the lawyer Marc Lalonde and the public servant Michael Pitfield—because of his generosity in expressing his own ideas. They also had their good times and laughed easily together: on one occasion as a few of them journeyed to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in the Maritimes, they decided to indulge in the local delicacy and ordered lobster at a roadside restaurant. Bitter was their disappointment when it came in sodden lumps from a can.14
Separatism itself did not lead immediately or always to a break in personal relations; when Trudeau visited Paris, for instance, he always saw François Hertel, who had openly embraced separatism at the beginning of the sixties. He even welcomed the new nonconformism of the youth in Quebec, which expressed itself in a riotous abundance of facial hair, T-shirts, and mini-skirts in Montreal’s lively bars and bistros. Moreover, like the rebellious young, he retained a Parisian’s disdain for American foreign policy and materialism, particularly the Vietnam War and nuclear policy. The problem was not the nonconformity of the young—he relished and personally represented individualism in taste—or the sixties amalgam of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He much enjoyed the first, tolerated but did not participate in the second, and danced superbly to the third. Rather, it was the conformity of the young that bothered him enormously, particularly at the university, where the students were overwhelmingly separatist. Most serious, in his view, was their unwillingness to consider alternative views and, in the case of the FLQ, their deadly seriousness. “Would Quebec miss the turn?” he had asked in 1960 on the eve of the Liberal victory. As he listened to students with their dreams of an “imaginary Jerusalem,” he feared that, once again, it had.
Trudeau therefore shared Julien’s sense that American energy and technology were transformative and that Canada was fortunate to share a continent with such a dynamic force for change. In the same vein, Quebec was blessed to be part of the prosperous and vital Canadian federation. Despite doubts about the influence of American investment that he had first expressed in the 1950s, he even accepted parts of Julien’s strained argument that Canada, with its openness through that investment to American technology and creativity, was “Europe’s last chance.”15
Trudeau no longer read much Quebec fiction—which increasingly played to Quebec nationalism. Gérald Godin, Hubert Aquin, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Godbout, and others who formed the cultural base of the nationalist and separatist efflorescence of the mid-sixties all annoyed Trudeau in their use of the colloquial “joual,” their polemical rejection of the past, and, above all, their profound political irresponsibility, as he saw it. Although chansonniers like Gilles Vigneault and Félix Leclerc touched his romantic core, he reacted uneasily to the marriage of the cultural avant-garde to separatism and its flirtation with violence. In a different sense, he opposed the attempt by academic sociologists, notably by his old friend Marcel Rioux (now a separatist), to treat francophone Quebec residents sociologically—a path that led directly to the distinctiveness that, in his view, found political expression in separation.16
Following the “purge” at Cité libre and the publication of the statement on functional politics, Trudeau became increasingly distressed about the more explicitly nationalist direction of the Lesage government. He simultaneously worried that Lester Pearson’s government in Ottawa was badly advised on constitutional matters and too weak to respond to the aggressive demands for jurisdiction and dollars from Quebec City. In his articles and in letters or comments to some of his closest friends—Carroll Guérin and Madeleine Gobeil, both now in Europe, and Marc Lalonde and Jacques Hébert—he expressed despair about the state of Canadian affairs and fretted over the best way to respond. Although he had never much admired Pearson, he had come to believe that Lesage was actually a weak leader who had lost control of his government. What should he do in these circumstances?
Trudeau realized that columns in Le Devoir or rants in Cité libre reached few of the workers in shops, in factories, or on farms who would make the final choice on the issue. Confrontations with his students in the classroom were also unsatisfying. He began to place his hope in television, which was entering a golden age of public affairs broadcasting. In 1964 he tried to negotiate an agreement with the CBC to become a host for the Inquiry series. The negotiations failed. Carroll Guérin summarized his sad lot in the early winter of 1965: “Correcting exams must be a huge bore; but I guess it is part of the price one has to pay for teaching. What a pity the TV thing proved to be a flop. It goes to show that our apprehensions were not without reason. It is a pity that entertainment is placed before ideas—but what can you expect from Toronto.”17
Laurier LaPierre, a McGill University historian, became the Quebec intellectual who charmed English Canadians in 1965, alongside Patrick Watson, on This Hour Has Seven Days, a Sunday night program that shocked both the government and its audience. But Trudeau became a frequent participant in seminars and other academic gatherings as Canadians tried to understand what the tempests of change would bring. In 1964 the federal Parliament bitterly debated a new flag for Canada, one that would not bear the t
raditional British symbols. Carroll Guérin detested the design; Trudeau dismissed it as a trifle. In October 1964 riots broke out as the Queen made the last royal visit to Quebec City, not long after another English institution, the Beatles, made a more successful imperial progress across North America. The times, the American folk artist Bob Dylan rightly declared, were “achangin.’” But not always happily, it sometimes seemed, for Trudeau. His enemies appeared to be multitudinous, and Malcolm Reid summarized their reasons in his book about the literary and political radicals of mid-sixties Montreal:
What Partipristes could not forgive Trudeau, what seemed to them false and treacherous in his demolition of theocracy, was his cool, assured tone. How could he live in the smothering of liberty and not cry, not scream, not scribble on walls, not take to drink or dynamite? Such calm could come only from a basic cosiness with the very English money which paid for this reign of darkness, an Anglo-Saxon confidence that all would be straightened out when the French-Canadians learned engineering, business administration and behaviorist labour relations.18
The critique was unfair, but not entirely incorrect. Even if Peter Gzowski had described him—admiringly—as an “angry young man,” Trudeau had learned to control his internal rage and to present himself to the world with a “cool, assured tone.” In his self and in his politics, he was determined to be “functional,” just like the architectural style—lean, international, and modern. And that style increasingly impressed those who came into contact with him, in person, through the press, or on television. Trudeau, a leading francophone professor told Ramsay Cook in 1964, was “the most talented intellectual in Quebec,” but, alas, one whose talents were not fully exploited.19 That situation was about to change.
The fourth year of the Quiet Revolution began with the Armée pour la libération de Québec, one of the several fringe separatist groups, announcing its intention of liberating the province by force within two years—a declaration punctuated on January 30,1964, when an ALQ group stole a truckload of arms and ammunition, including anti-tank missiles, from the armouries of the Fusiliers de Montréal. Further raids on defence installations occurred on February 15 and February 20. Editorialists debated whether the Queen should stay home as rumours of a murder plot circulated. “Are we savages?” Lorenzo Paré asked in L’Action. During the royal visit, the police struck the separatists down with truncheons. The Globe and Mail reacted as the separatists hoped when it declared that “Canada has walked to the edge of crisis and in many ways its performance has been appalling.” Trudeau had no love for the British monarchy, but he agreed: events were spinning out of control.20
In 1964 Abbé Lionel Groulx, one of Trudeau’s early mentors, published Chemin de 1’avenir, “the road to the future”—a future that he claimed lay somewhere between outright independence and associate-state status. Immediately, the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste came out in support of an associate state in a document written by the well-known historian Michel Brunet. Such a tract would likely have gathered dust in the archives except for its endorsement on May 9, 1964, by René Lévesque, who declared that associate-state status should be negotiated “without rifles and dynamite as soon as possible.” Lévesque did not back down, and soon even Jean Lesage seemed to affirm most of his arguments. Such demands can easily be dismissed today as empty political rhetoric, but Trudeau and others recognized that the Lesage government had gathered together an impressive group of bureaucrats who were more than a match for their federal counterparts. The Ottawa men were reeling under the continual expansion of Quebec City’s demands.
The Pearson government had come to office committed to creating a European type of welfare state in Canada. Unlike Europe and even the United States, Canada had no “social security” system in 1963. Only a fraction of high school graduates went to university, compared with the system of mass university education that had developed in the United States after the Second World War. Pearson’s ambitions, which were inscribed in the Liberal Party platform after the historic “Thinkers’ Conference” at Kingston, Ontario, in September 1960, directly challenged the distribution of powers in the British North America Act, in which health, education, and social welfare generally were the responsibility of the provinces. Despite the opposition of many provinces, including, of course, Quebec, the Pearson government, once elected, decided to press forward with a fundamental restructuring of the role of the state in Canadian life. The Lesage government proposed the same for Quebec.21 Not surprisingly, the governments clashed.
The clash, however, was sometimes productive—in many ways a justification of Canadian federalism, as Trudeau argued at the time. The province of Quebec had independently developed a strong proposal for a social security or pension system. The federal government was compelled to react. After difficult and bitter negotiations, the Canada Pension Plan and the Quebec Pension Plan were created through a system in which Quebec was allowed to “opt out” and receive a larger share of “tax points.” Judy LaMarsh, Pearson’s minister of health and welfare, threatened to resign over the issue, but pleas to her that invoked “national unity” concerns obtained her silence—for a while.* Trudeau welcomed the new social spending, but was disconcerted by the clumsy and irregular character of the decision-making and by the precedents being set.
What astonished Trudeau more were the moves by the Quebec government to obtain an independent presence in international affairs. What had begun, sensibly, as the creation of a francophone Canadian presence in the French world, with the establishment of Quebec offices in Paris and elsewhere, had become a path whereby Quebec would attain an independent right to sign treaties and to conduct international relations in areas of provincial competence. More troubling was the presence in Charles de Gaulle’s government of numerous officials who encouraged Quebec in these ambitions. Trudeau’s old acquaintance Paul Gérin-Lajoie, a leading constitutional scholar, was the political and intellectual leader of the Quebec foray onto the international stage, and others, notably Le Devoir journalist and nationalist Jean-Marc Léger, rallied intellectual opinion behind the government’s ambitions.
In January 1965, while the two men were both relaxing in Florida, Lesage told Pearson he had lost control of his government: he felt like a man holding on to the tail of an enraged bear. Public opinion polls indicated that Quebec separatism was no longer an idle dream but, potentially, a political movement with the support of somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of Quebec voters. As the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism travelled through the country, commissioners heard tales of francophones who had lived in Ontario, Manitoba, or elsewhere who had been denied jobs and told to “speak white.” These incidents sparked many comments and bred resentment. André Laurendeau’s diary of the commission’s tour included such details as the young francophone living near Windsor, Ontario, who told how her French accent caused her problems even in an area with a historic and substantial French presence. When she was trying to rent an apartment, a friend told her not to make the calls because of her accent. Across Canada, the Commission rubbed against old scar tissue from the earlier wounds of conscription during the war, school language battles, and the rebellion of Louis Riel. Laurendeau also recounted how one commission member, Gertrude Laing, spoke with a young “Anglo-Canadian” who admitted that “he hated the French, that several of his friends felt the same way,” and that he did not “believe at all in the task we are involved in.” When pressed why, he said he had the impression that Quebec was “destroying the Canada he loves.”
Polls taken by the Calgary Herald and the Winnipeg Free Press indicated that their readers believed the commission’s work was harmful—an opinion Conservative leader John Diefenbaker shared. Not surprisingly, the commissioners decided they must sound an alert by issuing a “preliminary” report. Published in February 1965, that report declared, memorably, that “Canada, without being fully conscious of the fact, is passing through the greatest crisis in its history.”22
After the
commissioners rang this alarm, Cité libre published an anonymous attack on the report and on Laurendeau himself. Laurendeau was convinced that Trudeau was its principal author. He learned his suspicions were correct when Jean Marchand confirmed them and Trudeau later “partially” agreed. Trudeau’s papers do contain a draft of the text.23 It was primarily the commission’s method that concerned Trudeau. As historian J.L. Granatstein observed, “the commissioners had gone beyond the traditional role of a royal commission in collecting data and offering recommendations; instead, they had involved themselves in the process and had become, in fact, animateurs.” Trudeau, Marc Lalonde, and the others who had called for a functional politics thought that Laurendeau remained trapped within the nationalist womb—especially given his musings about a special status for Quebec. They feared that the federal Liberals’ Quebec representation was simply too weak to counter the challenge from Quebec City and, at the same time, deal with the commission’s demands.
In the spring of 1965, however, national public opinion polls began to shift towards the Liberals. John Diefenbaker’s protracted and histrionic opposition to the maple-leaf flag had angered many Canadians, and the Quebec Conservative Party had disintegrated. Despite some doubts about the bi and bi commission, there was a general expectation that its report would work to the Liberals’ advantage. Many in the party therefore pressured Pearson to call an election
Unfortunately, at this moment, scandals and corruption were dogging the Quebec Liberals.24 The weak Quebec ministers were a problem in Ottawa. Guy Favreau, the minister of justice, had been unable to secure provincial acceptance for the Fulton-Favreau proposals on the reform of the Canadian Constitution. Now his health was quickly failing and, in the spring of 1965, he became embroiled in a scandal surrounding a notorious drug dealer, Lucien Rivard.* Pearson had already lost his parliamentary secretary, Guy Rouleau, because of the scandal and the firebrand Yvon Dupuis because of an apparent bribe.25 Now two more Quebec ministers, Maurice Lamontagne and René Tremblay, had become major political liabilities because of their alleged failure to pay for furniture from a bankrupt Montreal furniture dealer. The scandals, the astute journalist Richard Gwyn wrote in 1965, “resulted from a series of compromises made in the name of political expedience, which permitted what Le Devoir memorably termed ‘the Montreal Liberal trashcan’ to stand outside the back door of Parliament a good half-decade after it should have been removed.”26