by John English
For much of the fall of 1966, Trudeau himself was absent from Ottawa because he was a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations. There he infuriated Paul Martin Sr., Canada’s minister of external affairs, who at the time was leading all the polls as the most likely successor to Lester Pearson. In the late 1940s Pearson had established the practice of sending promising MPs of all parties to the UN as a way of building support for his foreign policy, and it proved to be an effective tool. Trudeau, however, took an immediate dislike to the elaborate rituals of the UN and to the policies Canada espoused there, particularly its tortured approach to the admission of China. He openly dissented from Paul Martin’s “two China” approach, which called for both mainland China and Taiwan to have representation and was doomed to failure.
The Vietnam War now dominated the headlines as American involvement deepened and international opposition to the war grew. Yet the UN was at the sidelines, unable to give leadership in ending the conflict. Gérard Pelletier later recalled that Trudeau often spoke about the war in these times and, like Ryan, Laurendeau, and most Quebec intellectuals, strongly opposed American involvement. Vietnam, which had charmed him so much on his 1949 voyage, disappointed him when he returned in 1959. It no longer had “charme” or “classe.” He noticed the police everywhere and the presence of the International Control Commission members, including many Canadians. Sadly he noted: “The country will perhaps be divided forever.” More disturbing was the evidence that the government in the South depended entirely on the support of the Americans, who were ubiquitous.53 However, Marcel Cadieux from External Affairs, who had served in Vietnam in the 1950s and detested Communist North Vietnam, discouraged Martin from criticizing American war policy. Trudeau, therefore, cast an increasingly wary eye towards the External Affairs Department and its minister, especially after he learned from Cadieux that Paul Martin favoured a conciliatory approach to the romance blooming between the government of Daniel Johnson and France. With Lalonde and others, he became sharply critical of Martin and warmly welcomed the January re-entry to the Cabinet of Walter Gordon, a vocal critic of American foreign policy.54
Gordon’s return would be fundamentally important to Trudeau’s future, although he barely knew Gordon at the time. Gordon was an ardent economic nationalist, an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam, a critic of Canadian membership in NATO and in NORAD, and an increasingly strong critic of Pearson, whose political career he had financed and nurtured more than anyone else.55 And the times increasingly favoured the left. Canadian Dimension, a magazine founded by one of the Vietnam “draft dodgers” from the United States who took refuge in Canada, polled many leading intellectuals in the winter of 1967 and discovered that most expected a “nationalist and socialist” government to rule Canada very soon. Pearson sensed the change and—in an astute political move—began to tack to the left.56
Gordon had expected that Maurice Lamontagne would join him in the Cabinet. When he did not, Gordon asked Pearson for an explanation. Pearson replied that Jean Marchand had vetoed the appointment—information Gordon immediately passed on to Lamontagne, who then confronted Pearson. The prime minister confirmed the story and invited the two men to his residence to sort it out. There Marchand told Lamontagne that the Quebec caucus would not accept his reappointment to Cabinet. It was a brutal blow and pointed both to Marchand’s pre-eminence in federal Quebec politics and to the opportunity open to new Cabinet members from Quebec. Not surprisingly, on April 4, 1967, Trudeau succeeded the battered Cardin as minister of justice. In a single, quite brilliant stroke, Pearson appointed the most outstanding constitutional specialist in the party just as Quebec and the Constitution were becoming the major issues facing the government, and he strengthened the left of the party just as the NDP threatened the Liberals in English Canada. On both fronts, Trudeau acted quickly to reinforce his strengths.57
The times appeared to be perfectly tailored to fit Pierre Trudeau. In 1967 the very foundations of tradition seemed to be collapsing as John Lennon declared the Beatles more popular than Jesus Christ, the pill broke down ancient sexual taboos, and the young cheered for revolution. Canada finally seemed ready to abandon its reserve as television broke through restrictions in its treatment of sex, politics, and religion. Above all, it was Canada’s Centennial Year, which began quietly but, by late spring, had become a noisy celebration of a North American country that was suddenly and unexpectedly “cool.” Expo 67 in Montreal became a wildly successful world’s fair that gave a sophisticated and modern face both to Quebec and to Canada.58
In English Canada, even Canadian Business magazine welcomed Trudeau enthusiastically and declared that the “swinging millionaire from Montreal who drove sports cars and wore ascots into the House of Commons” represented “the best traditions of the engagé intellectual.” The French press was more restrained, including Claude Ryan in Le Devoir, who complained that Trudeau did not reflect Quebec opinion in his constitutional orthodoxy. Trudeau brushed off the complaints, quickly organized his office, and embarked on an astonishingly ambitious agenda that would transform Canada. Justice Department officials who had heard of Trudeau’s “playboy” reputation were astounded to encounter a remarkably disciplined worker with great intellectual ability and an unusually retentive memory. Years later, when asked what was most impressive about Trudeau, staff members matched each other with tales about his “elephantine” memory for detail, to the point where he could recall memoranda by date and even by paragraph. Nicole Sénécal, a press secretary, said she never had a “boss” so difficult yet so wonderful.59
Initially, he focused on two major items: the Canadian Constitution and the reform of the Criminal Code. It was the latter that attracted the public’s interest as the forty-seven-year-old bachelor announced plans to legalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, permit abortion when a mother’s health was endangered, and broaden greatly the grounds for divorce. “Justice,” Trudeau told Peter Newman, then a journalist for the Toronto Star, “should be regarded more and more as a department planning for the society of tomorrow, not merely the government’s legal advisor … Society is throwing up problems all the time—divorce, abortions, family planning, pollution, etc.—and it’s no longer enough to review our statutes every 20 years.”
Within six months, in the late fall of 1967, Trudeau introduced these historic amendments to Canada’s Criminal Code, and just before Christmas the House unanimously approved the first divorce reforms in one hundred years. A senior NDP member, H.W. Herridge, praised Trudeau for creating a “precedent in Canadian history.” Where other governments had avoided divorce reform as “politically dangerous,” Trudeau himself had moved forward and had shown he was “a very sensitive, humanitarian individual.” According to one correspondent, “Trudeau blushed.”60
Lester Pearson had announced his resignation a week before Herridge spoke. The Centennial had brought much satisfaction but also considerable grief. In late July Charles de Gaulle made his official visit to Canada aboard the French warship Colbert. After landing at Quebec City, the French president made a royal progress along the historic North Shore to Montreal. There, on July 24, from the balcony of Montreal’s Hôtel de Ville, the greatest French leader of the century made his infamous declaration, “Vive le Québec libre,” before a huge and enthusiastic throng. Lester Pearson was livid; Paul Martin Sr., who was in Montreal, counselled caution. When the Cabinet met on July 25, both Jean Marchand and Robert Winters were reluctant to rebuke de Gaulle.
Trudeau disagreed: according to the Cabinet minutes, the minister of justice “said the people in France would think the Government was weak if it did not react.” Moreover, he pointed out, de Gaulle did not have the support of French intellectuals, and the French press was opposed to him. Despite the hesitations of Martin, his most senior English Canadian minister, and Marchand, the leading Quebec minister, Pearson heeded Trudeau’s advice and his own instincts. With the help of the Quebec ministers, he drafted a harsh rebu
ke to de Gaulle, who responded by cancelling his plans to go to Ottawa. The incident strengthened Trudeau’s role within the Cabinet.61 It also raised the debate about Quebec’s future to a new intensity.
During the summer, Trudeau and Marchand consolidated their hold on the Quebec federal Liberals. The provincial party was debating a historic resolution that René Lévesque had placed before them, calling for Quebec independence followed by negotiations for an economic union with Canada. It was, Claude Ryan correctly wrote, “a new step towards the moment of truth.” For Trudeau and many of his colleagues, it was proof that Lévesque had long been a closet separatist. When the resolution was defeated, Lévesque and others left the Liberal Party and formed the Mouvement souveraineté-association—the base from which the Parti Québécois took form. At the MSA’s first meeting, Lévesque promised the triumph of a party committed to Quebec sovereignty, a party he would lead. The battle of Canada had begun.62
Lester Pearson had fought his last fight, and he knew his successor would face new battles on more difficult terrain where his skills were poor. So did Walter Gordon, whose influence in the party remained strong because he had mentored so many MPs and retained his close links with the Toronto Star. Gordon called Trudeau in mid-November and invited him to his Château Laurier suite to meet with two of his Cabinet allies, Edgar Benson and Larry Pennell. All four men agreed that they were not excited about “any of the leadership candidates.”63 Pearson had let it be known that the next leader should come from Quebec, and he initially turned towards Marchand. But Marchand’s flaws were many: his English was not good; his voluble personality was attractive but politically risky; and his judgment was not always sound. During the de Gaulle incident, he had been offside with Cabinet opinion, and his plan to allow public servants to unionize and strike was unpopular on editorial pages and among many of his colleagues.
Trudeau, in contrast, was attracting increasing attention, which he shrewdly did not exploit. The plan he had developed in the late 1930s, when he first determined he wanted a public and political life, remained in place. He would cloak himself in mystery and be the friend of all and the intimate of none. Moreover, the extraordinary discipline he revealed in bringing the Criminal Code legislation forward while simultaneously acting as the federal leader on constitutional matters dispelled most of the criticisms about the swinging playboy who had never worked.
Many friends commented that they had never seen Trudeau as happy as in the summer of 1967. True, there were some disappointments. His mother, who had nurtured his dreams of a public career, was no longer able to appreciate his success. The last note from her in his papers is a couple of tragically broken sentences from Florida written in the spring of 1965 as Alzheimer’s disease began to infiltrate her once lively, curious, and considerable mind. Her decline created a gap in his life that none could fill.
In Ottawa he was still frequently seen with Madeleine Gobeil, who taught at Carleton University and attracted great attention with an interview she did with Jean-Paul Sartre for Playboy magazine in 1966. They dined together regularly, talked long into the night, and shared their excitement about the new world unfolding before them. She introduced Trudeau to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and, probably more meaningfully, to the first James Bond movies—which, not surprisingly, Pierre relished.
Pierre’s most intense relationship during this decade appears to have been with Carroll Guérin, who now lived mostly in Britain. But after she and Trudeau spent that memorable summer together on the beach at St. Tropez, sharing an intense affair, she became ill with a serious virus. He saw her the next summer, although she was, in her own words, no longer fully a woman. They met again in 1964, when she was very ill and any physical activity was impossible. It was, she wrote, “very generous of you to want to meet me under these circumstances. I realize only too well what a burden I am, even to myself.”64
Guérin never forgot Trudeau’s kindness. He also persuaded her mother, who regarded her artist daughter’s European residence as expensive whimsy and her illness as primarily psychological, to become more generous. Like most of Trudeau’s female friends, Guérin was emotionally voluble and poured out her feelings freely and passionately. She, too, found Trudeau “emotionally withdrawn” and sought to turn the keys that locked his core. In the summer of 1967 he disappointed her when she hoped to meet him in Corsica. Instead, he left the Buonaparte Hotel before she arrived for the rendezvous, without informing her and without leaving a forwarding address. She admitted he had not “really sounded very enthusiastic over the phone in Montreal” when they planned the meeting. But, she wrote, “maybe it was all for the best … Anything you do, Pierre, will always be very close to my heart; but it would seem that as far as living together is concerned we are not able to manage … With all my heart, dearest Pierre, I wish you all the success that you so rightly deserve.” She would retain her deep affection for Trudeau despite being “stood up.”65
At Christmas that same year, it was Trudeau’s turn to be stood up. He decided that December to escape Canada’s winter and the increasing attention of politicians and the press by flying with two friends, Tim Porteous and Jim Domville, to Tahiti’s Club Méditerranée, where he intended to read Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and think about whether to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party. There, one afternoon as he was waterskiing, he attracted the attention of an alluring nineteen-year-old college student who was lying on a raft. Stunning in her bathing suit and with eyes that immediately entranced, Margaret drew crowds around her. Pierre came over to her and began to talk about Plato and student revolution—Plato, he knew well, while she was intimate with student revolt. She told him that her name was Margaret Sinclair and she was attending the new Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where student radicalism was in full flower. She was, in her words, drinking it all in—“the music, the drugs, the life.” She “jibed only at opium, scared off by Coleridge.” Yet she “did try mescaline one day, and spent hours sitting up a tree, wishing I were a bird.”
Margaret’s parents were holidaying at the Club Med with her. Her mother, the wife of the Honourable James Sinclair, a war veteran who had been a minister in the St. Laurent government, told her daughter that the man she had met was Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s minister of justice and the “black sheep” of the Liberal Party. Entranced by Margaret, Pierre joined the family at the long Club Med table for dinner each night. Margaret remembers she was not “particularly impressed,” even though her parents were increasingly aware of his growing attraction to their daughter. Later, when he, so very “shy” and polite, asked her to go deep-sea fishing, she initially said yes but went off instead with “Yves,” a handsome young French waterski instructor who was also the grandson of the founder of Club Mediterranée. He danced like a Tahitian and loved long into the night. But Pierre persisted, “old and square” though he might be. Margaret’s vitality, her astonishing beauty, and her refreshing candour left a deep impression on him as he flew home. When he next saw her, at the Liberal leadership convention three months later, the black sheep of the Liberal Party was about to become its “white knight.” At that moment, suddenly, he recalled Tahiti.66
* By the fall of 1964, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, chaired by André Laurendeau and Carleton University president Davidson Dunton, was, in historian Jack Granatstein’s words, “far and away the largest research organization in the country,” with eight divisions, forty-eight full- or part-time researchers, and a small army of consultants and students. Besides Marchand and Laurendeau, Trudeau knew well Frank Scott and journalist Jean-Louis Gagnon, who were committee members. The commission’s eight members were evenly balanced between francophones and anglophones and included one francophone and one anglophone “ethnic,” Professors J.B. Rudnyckyj and Paul Wyczynski (who is, coincidentally, the father of the archivist directly responsible for the Trudeau archive). There was one female member, Gertrude Laing of Alberta, but no Aboriginal member—t
he cause of much complaint during committee hearings.
* Judy LaMarsh was excluded from the final meeting when the deal was made to create the pension plans. She wrote in her bitter memoirs: “I felt that I had been shamefully treated by my Leader. Pearson did not then, nor has he ever, even acknowledged what a dirty trick he played. I admit that circumstances may have forced his hand, but I will always maintain that he did not need to do it that way.” Later, LaMarsh became a strong opponent of “special deals” for Quebec and, eventually, of Pierre Trudeau, even though he largely shared her opinion. Judy LaMarsh, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage (Toronto: Pocket Books, 1970), 281.
* Lucien Rivard was a drug dealer whom the United States wanted to extradite. In fighting the extradition, he managed to gain the assistance of Guy Masson, a prominent Liberal, and, more important, Guy Rouleau, the parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, as well as Raymond Denis, the executive assistant to the minister of citizenship and immigration and the executive assistant to Favreau himself. Denis, it appeared, offered a $25,000 bribe to the lawyer representing Rivard. Favreau should have submitted the case to Justice Department legal advisers rather than deciding himself that no charge should be laid.
Favreau offered his resignation, Pearson refused it, but then appointed him to a new portfolio. He remained bitter for the remaining few years of his life because so many had abandoned him. Tellingly, Pearson responded to a letter from the eminent historian A.R.M. Lower, who had complained that there was too much “rot” in Canadian politics, by saying: “I do not agree that the conduct of Mr. Favreau, Mr. Lamontagne, and Mr. Tremblay, however inept and ill advised, represents any form of corruption or lack of integrity on their part.” Lower had neither mentioned the three ministers nor referred specifically to Quebec.