by John English
At the very moment when Quebec had become the Liberal government’s most challenging issue, its francophone voices were discredited. Gérard Pelletier declared that Pearson’s path led him into a “perpetual cul-de-sac,” no matter what direction he turned. Journalists in French and in English cruelly portrayed Lester Pearson, who had privately impressed André Laurendeau and the other commissioners with his sensitivity and shrewdness, as a hopeless bungler. In January 1965 Pearson had met with Lesage and implored him to come to Ottawa, suggesting that the post of prime minister would be his reward. Lesage told him the timing was wrong: he was in the third year of his mandate in Quebec, and an election would normally fall in the fourth year. Pearson knew that the federal Liberals could not wait so long. Their sophisticated American pollster Oliver Quayle told them they must call an election in the summer of 1965, while Diefenbaker was still the Conservative leader. Moreover, in July 1965 Pearson managed to get nearly all the premiers to agree to a “medicare” plan, thereby giving the Liberals the progressive issue they needed to attract NDP votes. Despite strong opposition from many prominent Liberals, including Defence Minister Paul Hellyer and the wily political veteran Paul Martin Sr., the Liberals had already raised expectations of an election.
Pearson, who stood accused of indecisiveness, could hold off no longer. After a late-summer tour of the West, he returned to Ottawa on September 7, 1965, and called an election. Three days later, at a Montreal press conference in the Windsor Hotel, the three friends Pierre Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier, and Jean Marchand together announced that they would stand as Liberal candidates. For the Liberals, it was a coup; for Quebec politics, a shock.
Jean Marchand was the prize: a trade union leader as Liberals battled with the NDP for labour votes; a bare-knuckled debater who could go “toe to toe” with Réal Caouette’s Créditistes; and a popular figure with the Lesage government, including René Lévesque. But the fall of 1965 was Trudeau’s time too, just as it was Marchand’s and Pelletier’s. Marchand’s role in the labour movement had become more difficult, and he had resigned as the head of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) in the spring, knowing that politics offered an alternative. In that same spring, the board of directors of La Presse had fired Pelletier as editor.27 Politics beckoned all three men to the Liberal fold almost at once. Trudeau was elated—his mood reflected the excitement of his new venture, his sense of mission at this troubled time in Quebec’s and Canada’s history, and the realization, at last, of his plan to be a political man.
Jean Marchand had considered running provincially or federally with the Liberals since 1960. When he decided not to run in 1963 because of Pearson’s stand on nuclear weapons, he stepped aside quietly. Such was not the case with Pelletier, whose editorial opinions at La Presse denounced the decision and continued to criticize the scandals that plagued Pearson’s minority government. It was Trudeau, however, who rankled Liberal veterans most. They forgot neither his bitter denunciation of Pearson’s decision to accept nuclear weapons nor his frequent attacks on Liberal MPs as “imbeciles” or “trained donkeys.” Accordingly, Pearson was informed that Vadeboncoeur, not Trudeau, was the author of the notorious phrase “the defrocked prince of peace.” Technically, the explanation was valid, although Pearson apparently was not told that Trudeau liked the phrase so much that he had chosen it to introduce his own caustic essay on Pearson in Cité libre. Fortunately, there were no copies of the review in Pearson’s library. According to Jean Marchand, the powerful national party organizer Keith Davey tried to convince him that he should run alone only days before the election was announced. But he stood firm and insisted that the others must run too. He had “great confidence,” he told Davey, “in Mr. Trudeau’s mind and in Pelletier’s judgement.”
On September 9 the decision could be delayed no longer. At Guy Favreau’s request, Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau met with him at a suite in Montreal’s Windsor Hotel, along with Maurice Lamontagne and party organizer Robert Giguère. Maurice Sauvé apparently came without invitation. The meeting began at 8:00 p.m. and lasted until 3:00 a.m. Lamontagne frankly argued against the candidacy of Trudeau and Pelletier, telling them that things would be “very tough” and they would receive a cold welcome in Ottawa. But Trudeau maintained his “jolly mood” through it all. At 4 p.m. the next day, September 10, the three, quickly dubbed the “Three Wise Men” by the English press and “Les trois colombes”—the Three Doves—in the French press, announced that they had suddenly become Liberals and would stand as candidates in the next election.28
Trudeau remained the coy political mistress and took some time to find a constituency. According to journalist Michel Vastel, Trudeau dreamed of representing Saint-Michel de Napierville, where his ancestors had dwelt. It provoked uproarious laughter in the editorial rooms as journalists pondered the image of “the intellectual of Cité libre, the bourgeois of Outremont” going from door to door among the farms on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence. More astutely, the young Liberal Eddie Goldenberg realized Trudeau’s remarkable political appeal when he came just after the announcement to speak to students at McGill University. He reflected on Greek philosophy, analyzed democratic thought, and, to Goldenberg’s initial consternation, spoke unlike any politician he had ever heard. But the students were entranced. With Trudeau, it seemed that politics at last might be different.29
After much commotion, the party finally found Trudeau a seat in Mount Royal, a constituency that was rich, strongly Liberal, largely anglophone, and with a significant Jewish population. McGill University law professor Maxwell Cohen had positioned himself to run there, so Pearson intervened himself to persuade a disappointed Cohen to step aside. The excellent House Speaker Alan Macnaughton, who had held the seat since 1949 with remarkable majorities in recent elections, gracefully made way for Trudeau. However, the popular physician and veteran Victor Goldbloom was unwilling to allow the party’s favourite a clear run at the nomination. His reluctance may have emerged from Trudeau’s casual appearance when he came to a meeting with Liberal organizers driving his Mercedes sports car and wearing “an open-collared sports shirt, a suede jacket, a beat-up old peaked hat, muddy corduroy slacks, and sandals.” He was sent home to change before the sceptical party faithful could encounter this strange new political beast. Trudeau mused about dropping out, claiming he did not want to run against Goldbloom, who was a “good man.” The result, Marchand said, was “the most awkward convention I have ever seen, with Goldbloom saying that Trudeau was the best candidate, and Trudeau saying that Goldbloom was the best candidate.” At the insistence and with the blessing of Pearson’s organizers, Trudeau became the candidate.30
Marchand had to calm Trudeau once more when he learned that his friend Charles Taylor, for whom he had campaigned in 1963, would be his NDP opponent. Taylor had participated in a joint attack in Cité libre in reply to Pelletier’s and Trudeau’s October 1965 explanations for their decision to run for the Liberals. Their argument for joining the Liberal Party amounted to a blunt statement that they wanted to be politicians to carry out their policy aims, and only the Liberal Party offered them the possibility of placing their hands on the levers of power. “There are two ways in which one can become involved in public life,” they wrote: “from the outside by critically examining the ideas, institutions, and men who together create political reality; or from the inside itself by becoming a politician oneself.”31 It was, as Taylor pointed out, the type of expedient argument that Trudeau and Pelletier had so often condemned.
Moreover, they were both self-declared voices on the left, and their decision weakened the NDP, whose popular leader, Tommy Douglas, was attracting much new support. Their sudden switch to the Liberals stunned the Canadian left, but it also encouraged many. Ramsay Cook, who had been an eloquent voice interpreting Quebec politics and thought among English-Canadian intellectuals, wrote to Trudeau on September 10, 1965: “Today’s announcement of your intention to seek a nomination in the next election astonis
hed me … While my heart is with the NDP, I would gladly do anything I could to help you.” He, too, had become disillusioned by the NDP’s two-nation policy. Trudeau’s old colleague Maurice Blain—not so willing to help—was disappointed that they had abandoned the political left to work in “a traditional party subservient to capitalism, identified with anti-democratic institutions, and committed to electoral opportunism.”32 These comments worried Trudeau, but Marchand convinced him he should not let them get to him and simply knock on doors to win the votes.
On November 8 Trudeau won Mount Royal with a margin of 13,135 votes, less than half of Macnaughton’s margin of 28,793 in 1963. It was not a smashing victory, but he had a safe seat for the remainder of his long political career, always with large margins of victory. The government also won re-election, but once again the cherished majority eluded Lester Pearson as Diefenbaker’s campaign skills carved up the Liberal vote, especially in the West, and scandals continued to plague the Liberals in Quebec.* It was, Liberal organizer John Nichol later said, “a long, long way to go for nothing.” Marchand entered the Cabinet immediately as the minister of citizenship and immigration, with the promise that he would soon become the minister of a new Department of Manpower. Once Pearson named him his senior Quebec minister, Marchand relished the task of “cleaning up” the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party.
Pelletier and Trudeau took their place on the back benches, probably because some penance was appropriate before the other Liberal MPs could be expected to accept the freshly minted Liberals. Politically, it was wise to dampen expectations because the trio had caused a whirlwind in Quebec, especially in intellectual circles where there was, in Blain’s words, “an emotional reaction.” As he perceptively remarked just after the election, the three “had not so much embraced a new career as set out on a mission.” Detested by separatists, distrusted by neo-nationalists and the left, they came to represent a shift in the political landscape in Quebec and, perhaps, in Canada. For Pierre Vadeboncoeur, this mission slowed the swelling momentum leading to an independent socialist Quebec. Laurendeau, who approved of their switch, nevertheless believed that “their decision dealt a major blow to ‘democratic socialism’ in Quebec, and killed a lot of hopes.” Years later, Bob Rae, the former federal NDP member of parliament and Ontario premier, said that their emergence on the federal scene as Liberals “ended the dream of a socialist Canada under a New Democratic government.”33
Such judgments belonged to the future in the fall of 1965 when, in Pelletier’s words, “many people thought that Trudeau and I would cross the aisle in Parliament after a month.” Of course, they did not. In 1992 Trudeau told Michael Ignatieff, who had supported his campaign for the leadership in 1968, that he had decided “not to make party options too soon.” Rather, he advised, you should complete your philosophical formation first because, “once you join a party, it’s hard to switch. You have the whole history of friendship and everything else.”
Even before the supposedly decisive meeting on September 9, 1965, Trudeau had told Madeleine Gobeil that he was making “the big jump.”* More tellingly, his confidante Carroll Guérin wrote to him in October, just before the election. She regretted leaving him at the airport, “though I am quite glad that you are engrossed in politics now; probably because I’m safely removed from the front now! But I felt I was leaving you to something very vital (to put it mildly), and not walking off while you returned to a way of life that you must admit was something of a dead end.” She summarized so many intimate conversations in those two brief sentences. Pierre, whom she loved profoundly, had found his place. “With hugs,” she concluded her letter, “even if you are in the Liberal Party.”34
The Liberal Party was scarcely congenial for a backbencher arriving in Ottawa in the winter of 1965–66. Walter Gordon, who had strongly urged Pearson to have an election, offered his resignation after the defeat. To Gordon’s surprise, Pearson accepted it. With Gordon’s departure, the left or reformist wing of the party was suddenly weak, particularly when the more conservative Mitchell Sharp became the new minister of finance and the decidedly conservative Robert Winters, after he had divested himself of his numerous company directorships, minister of trade and commerce.
What this reorganization meant, the eminent journalist and editor Claude Ryan wrote in Le Devoir, was that the Cabinet had “two tiers”—the first a group of senior ministers who were “the real masters,” and the second a group of juniors, who would have to prove themselves. The “masters” came almost entirely from Ontario; in Quebec, only Marchand might be called upon “to enter the ‘inner sanctum’ where the big decisions are made.” Ryan was correct in his assessment that nearly all the Quebec ministers were on the lower tier; what he did not realize was the extent of the mandate Pearson gave Marchand to “do that [cleanup] job” in Quebec they both deemed essential. Trudeau and Pelletier, in Marchand’s words, supported him but “were not directly involved or personally involved” in the political house-cleaning. They were backbenchers “like the others,” though already an aura surrounded them.35 There were also the doubters and the believers.
The influential Toronto Globe and Mail greeted the entry of Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau as potential bulls in a Liberal store filled with fragile china. For his part, Pearson’s lead Quebec minister Guy Favreau, though willing to accept their entry, was so upset that he took “a long ride on his motorcycle at high speeds” to work off his frustration—no doubt something Pierre had done in the past himself.36 Of the three, Trudeau was the least well known; the firing of Pelletier from La Presse amid rumours of plots by Lesage and large business interests had attracted attention even in English Canada. Trudeau was not listed in the English-language Canadian Who’s Who for 1965, and almost none of his writings were available in English. When he first arrived in the fall, Ottawa reporters treated him as an exotic species whose sartorial tastes as much as his intellectual prowess set him apart from his parliamentary colleagues.* Not for the first time, the media attributed to him a lower age.
Yet difference and mystery intrigue. In a book on Canadian nationalism published in 1966, the well-known University of Toronto historian Kenneth McNaught famously drew attention to Trudeau: “It was to stem the now common habit of looking upon and treating Ottawa as a foreign power that this brilliant and essentially non-political sophisticate plunged into the icy waters of federal politics in Quebec.” McNaught, a leading socialist activist and the biographer of J.S. Woodsworth, feared Trudeau’s impact on his NDP but welcomed his voice in Ottawa and Quebec:
For his pains he has been smeared as a vendu, and there is little doubt that he shares what I have called the English-speaking view of Canada. His political fate will likely be the political fate of Canada. Nor should anyone question the agony of his decision, for it involved further crippling the struggling Quebec wing of the NDP, which is the party that best represents Trudeau’s social thought. His decision that the Liberal party—the party which flirts most openly with American continentalism—is yet the party which alone might avert the imminent culmination of racial nationalism was the measure of his fears for Canada.37
In Quebec, Jean-Paul Desbiens, whom Trudeau and Cité libre had honoured in 1960 for the publication of his notorious attack on the Quebec education system, similarly declared in a letter to Trudeau that he and his colleagues represented for Canada its “last hand of cards.”38
Trudeau, wisely, appeared eager to lower expectations. During the election campaign he told reporters that when he became a candidate, he was not offered a Cabinet post. Moreover, he said, “I made it clear I did not want such a post before anyone had the chance to offer me one.” Blair Fraser, the national reporter Trudeau had known well since his youth, wrote profiles of Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand shortly after the Cabinet was formed in December 1965. The article rightly identified Marchand as the key player. “Trudeau and Pelletier,” Fraser wrote, “are quite content as backers of Marchand, with no special ambitions.” He repo
rted that Trudeau found the all-candidate debates surprisingly enjoyable and that “his wry humour went down well.” He also rightly identified some of the baggage that Trudeau carried with him to Ottawa: he had “never been obliged to work for a living”; his “English-speaking mother (Le Devoir insists on spelling his name Elliott-Trudeau)”; and, “gravest of all … his habit of speaking his mind.” Some details aside, the article, oddly, has one wildly-off-the-mark analytical flaw—Fraser’s assertion that “the fact that he is a well-to-do bachelor” was something “which women voters seem to resent.”39
Immediately after the election, while others flew to Ottawa to pursue positions, Trudeau, true to form, went off to Europe on a ski trip. While he was there, Pearson decided to offer him the post of parliamentary secretary to the prime minister. Trudeau promptly declined, probably because he was wary of working closely with Pearson when he had little knowledge of him and his office or simply because he worried—correctly—that too rapid promotion breeds jealousy.
Marchand was livid. He had promoted Trudeau for the position of parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance and was pleasantly surprised to learn that Pearson wanted him for the Prime Minister’s Office. Never close personally to Trudeau and exasperated with his moral dithering about running against Victor Goldbloom for the Liberal nomination and then against Charles Taylor in the election, he called Trudeau in Europe. In the sanitized version of the heated conversation that appears in his memoirs, Trudeau says that he told Marchand: “Give me time to get settled, to do my homework. You know I don’t like to go into anything unprepared.” Marchand responded caustically: “We didn’t come here to refuse to work, Pierre. What brought us here is that there’s a job to be done, and we have to grab every opportunity to do it.”40 Trudeau could not refuse his colleague, and so he became parliamentary secretary to Lester Pearson—the man he had criticized regularly since his first encounters with him as a young bureaucrat in Ottawa in 1949.*