by John English
* The final results were 131 Liberal (129 in previous Parliament); 97 Conservative (95); 21 NDP (17); 9 Créditistes and 5 Social Credit (24 combined). There were two independents. The Liberals took 40 percent of the popular vote; the Conservatives, 32 percent. In the pre-election polls and election polls, the Liberals were in the 45 percent range and stood at 44 percent in early November, just before the election. The Liberals actually had a higher percentage of the popular vote (42%) in the April 1963 election. The Liberals did gain 12 seats in Quebec, but lost three to the Conservatives despite the party split before the election. The NDP, despite the leadership of the popular Robert Cliche, did poorly, increasing its vote to 11.9 percent only because it ran many more candidates in Quebec.
* When Madeleine Gobeil met Grace Trudeau on election night, the proud mother declared: “Now he might amount to something.” Interview with Madeleine Gobeil, May 2006.
* The young Albertan political assistant Joyce Fairbairn first met Trudeau at the Parliamentary Restaurant, where he often had breakfast after the short walk from his room at the Château Laurier Hotel. He brought, she claimed, a reputation for being eccentric “because of his initial casual attitude toward wearing apparel. In a House of Commons filled with suits and ties and socks and laced shoes, he showed a shocking tendency toward sports jackets, cravats, and sandals—sometimes worn without socks.” After “a lengthy succession of boiled eggs,” she warmed to Trudeau, who made little of the “light political conversation” that marks “the Hill,” and she grew to respect him enormously. And to like him: “From the very beginning I sensed a shyness in him that was hooked on to an element of kindness that I came to know well over the years of work and friendship.” The shyness sometimes came through—wrongly in her view—as arrogance or lack of interest. Joyce Fairbairn in Nancy Southam, ed., Pierre (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 39.
* When asked why he appointed Trudeau his parliamentary secretary, Pearson said: “I had read his pieces for years, and was impressed by them, particularly by his detailed technical knowledge of economics and constitutional law. We’re into a period where that’s very important, and we’ll be dealing a lot with Quebec. Pierre is a Quebecer and seems the kind of qualified person we need.” It is unlikely that Pearson had read his pieces for years, and Trudeau did not have “technical knowledge of economics.” Yet, in a period when the Quebec government had many highly sophisticated constitutional specialists, such as Claude Morin, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and Jacques-Yvan Morin, and “technical economists,” such as Michel Bélanger and Jacques Parizeau, Trudeau was a precious asset in Ottawa.
* In one disgraceful episode when Pearson repeated the threat, Diefenbaker responded by shaking his fists at Pearson and saying that “he had a scandal” on him. Diefenbaker, in Pearson’s words, said that “he knew all about my days as a Communist.” Pearson laughed in his face and said it was the testimony of a “deranged woman,” Elizabeth Bentley, who had been a dubious but major source for J. Edgar Hoover and other Americans pursuing Communists.
* With a minority government, the House sat long into the summer of 1966. As a summer student working on Parliament Hill that year, I regularly saw Pearson and Paul Martin, whose External Affairs office was in the East Block. Even Guy Favreau made occasional appearances, but, except for a few votes in the House, Trudeau was rarely in Ottawa. I first learned about him when some friends of mine met him at a Laurentian resort in mid-summer. They found him serious with them but very flirtatious with the women.
CHAPTER 10
A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Gérard Pelletier was grumpy as he arrived for dinner in a small private room at Montreal’s Café Martin on a cold Sunday evening on January 14, 1968. Jean Marchand and Pierre Trudeau, his dinner companions, were “hale and hearty, in wonderful shape” after vacations in the sun, while he was “as pale as a grub.” Marchand had summoned his colleagues to discuss the fate of the Liberal Party as it faced an imminent leadership contest. The three had met in mid-summer and decided that it would be best if there were no francophone candidate because “the man to govern Canada was inevitably a conciliator, and in the present situation, francophone Canadians were in no mood for compromise.” But Marchand had changed his mind in December. There had been almost no francophone presence when the Progressive Conservatives chose Robert Stanfield as their new leader in September 1967. If there were no francophone candidates for the Liberal convention in April 1968, what would Quebec conclude? “That the Canadian government and the big federal parties are run by English Canadians, and we have nothing to do with it.” The logic seemed impeccable, but the real surprise was Marchand’s decision about his own future. He would not be a candidate—it must be Trudeau.1
Pelletier immediately realized that he would have “a ringside seat” for a historic political battle, and, the following day, he began a diary to record the Liberal leadership contest of 1968. Simultaneously Richard Stanbury, a newly appointed Toronto senator and the principal organizer of the leadership convention, also began a diary. Back in the fall, Lester Pearson had confided his intention to resign as prime minister to Stanbury and to John Nichol, the president of the Liberal Federation, and had correctly predicted that the leadership race would be hotly contested. Pearson hoped for a strong Quebec candidate—Marchand was his favourite—and he worried about Paul Martin Sr., the external affairs minister, who he believed belonged too much to the Liberal past at a time when new voices were essential.
As Richard Stanbury began preparations for the convention, he shared these worries. In early January, when he scheduled his meetings with the candidates, he began with Martin. “Who’s your candidate?” Martin demanded. “Of course I’m impartial,” Stanbury replied. “Oh, you and I know that, but who’s your candidate?” Stanbury said he thought it was a “fine wide-open race and that anyone might win.” Martin “harrumphed,” and the conversation ended. Stanbury already knew that Martin, who had stood first in the polls, was failing to find his expected support. Toronto, which had been a Tory bastion for most of Canada’s first century, was now a dynamic centre of Liberal intrigue, dreams, and fears.2
In the sixties, Toronto shucked off its conservative raiments and customs and donned the more colourful garb of its hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The formerly staid citizenry began to drink wine, open nightclubs, and play professional sports on Sunday. Stanbury still taught his Bible class every week, but the dense Protestant, British, and Conservative atmosphere surrounding the city was quickly lifting. Those traditional forces continued to hold sway on Bay Street, which, since the 1950s, had vanquished all its economic competitors. But Montreal remained Canada’s largest city and a very sexy one too, as the elegant modernity of Expo 67 and the swinging new night life in the old city testified. Pierre Trudeau’s path to 24 Sussex Drive would pass through the political heart of Canada’s two largest cities. As they set out to persuade him to run, Pelletier and Marchand told Trudeau they would “handle” Quebec; the rest of Canada was his concern. He barely knew “the rest,” but English Canada was quickly learning about Trudeau who the wily young political operative Keith Davey had not even considered as a possible candidate two months earlier.3 He cleverly borrowed Globe and Mail editorialist Martin O’Malley’s statement “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” and, in a December 22, 1967, television interview made it famously his own.4 It caught precisely the new spirit of the times.
On January 13, 1968, the Gallup Poll revealed that the Liberals had gained on the Conservatives, who had moved ahead in the polls after they chose the Nova Scotia premier, Robert Stanfield, in September. The Liberals now trailed by only six points. That same day Peter Newman reported that a group of Toronto academics were “rallying the forces” behind Pierre Trudeau. He described the instigators—Ramsay Cook, John Saywell, and William Kilbourn—as three of the academic community’s brightest young men, although he wrongly described these historians as political scientists.* Their petition imploring Trude
au to consider the Liberal leadership quickly gained signatures from hundreds of English-Canadian academics who were fascinated by the possibility of a Trudeau candidacy.5 Peter Newman linked the petition and its “assault on smug old-line thinking” with the forthcoming publication of Pierre Berton’s book Smug Minority, which, in Berton’s words, asserted that “the kind of political leadership we’ve had has been the wrong leadership, because it has been restricted to a cosy little group.” Trudeau, Berton claimed, would save Canada from this coterie:
Trudeau is the guy who really excites me; Trudeau represents a new look at politics in this country; he is the swinging young man I think the country needs. What we need is a guy with ideas so fresh and so different that he [is] going to be able to view the country from a different point of view. He has many weaknesses—inexperience, inability to project on the platform and all this. But they said these things about Kennedy too.
These comments from Newman and Berton, English Canada’s most influential journalists, appeared one day before Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau gathered for the fateful dinner at the Café Martin. Yet when Marchand said after the first aperitif that Trudeau should run, Trudeau was, in Pelletier’s words, “stunned.” He left his boeuf bourguignon untouched on the plate.
Why was Trudeau stunned? His close friend Jacques Hébert had been urging him to run for the leadership for months. In the fall he had met with Walter Gordon and other English-Canadian MPs and mused about leadership. Pelletier and Marchand were probably unaware of this meeting, but Trudeau surely recalled the important encounter. Pearson had told Marchand that there must be a Quebec “French” candidate, and there were only two possibilities—Marchand or Trudeau. In Montreal, Pearson’s aide Marc Lalonde did not take a Christmas vacation because he was busy organizing the potential Trudeau candidacy. Trudeau’s own assistants, Eddie Rubin and Pierre de Bané, helped Lalonde put the details in place—and Trudeau knew what they were doing. Just before New Year’s Eve, Lalonde persuaded Rubin and Gordon Gibson, the executive assistant to BC minister Arthur Laing, to rent an Ottawa office for the campaign. Rubin found the office, gave Gibson $1,000 to pay for it, and Gibson signed the lease—all to conceal the office’s true purpose. By that time Walter Gordon had told the Toronto Star that he favoured Marchand for the leadership, but, if Marchand did not run, Trudeau would be his choice.6 All this had happened before the dinner at Café Martin.
As usual, Trudeau’s coyness was deliberate and wise. He knew that Marchand’s support was crucial, but he was not yet certain that his colleague did not want to run. In Tahiti, he told Tim Porteous that he believed Marchand would eventually run. When Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand met again on January 18, Trudeau said he would be a candidate if Marchand refused, and then he listed his own weaknesses. Pelletier, who was much closer to Marchand than was Trudeau, believed that Trudeau “really wanted to be sure that Marchand’s refusal was final.” It was. Marchand privately and publicly attributed his refusal to his health—a serious drinking problem was already developing—and to his limited English vocabulary and heavy French accent. In December he had already told André Laurendeau that he had no desire to succeed Pearson, as Davidson Dunton had suggested to him. He told Laurendeau that he didn’t enjoy living in Ottawa: “I don’t like to have to speak English all the time; it diminishes me by 50%. It’s a crazy job, worse even than being a trade unionist—there at least you’ve got roots.”7
A second reason for Trudeau’s seeming reluctance was that he had several opportunities to gain exposure in the forthcoming few weeks, and they would be lost if he declared his candidacy. The Quebec Liberal Federation was meeting in Montreal on January 28, and Trudeau could advance his views there on law reform and constitutional review. Even more important was the constitutional conference that Pearson had promised after the “Confederation of Tomorrow” conference organized by John Robarts, the Ontario premier, in the fall of 1966. Trudeau and Pearson had responded by expressing a new willingness to discuss constitutional change and, in particular, a Canadian Bill of Rights that would form part of a revised Canadian Constitution. Trudeau had promised that he would consult the premiers before the constitutional conference. If he was a candidate, he would have to resign as minister of justice, a move that would imperil the chances for a breakthrough at the constitutional talks.
Finally, Trudeau was genuinely fearful of the intense glare of media attention on his private life. As reporters began to cluster about him, and his photograph appeared regularly in newspapers, he recognized that celebrity brought political gains, but at the expense of the inner core he had long and jealously protected. Madeleine Gobeil, who saw him often, recalls his intense need for a private space, away from other people. Right from the start of his time in the spotlight, he never bothered to correct the many stories that stated his age as forty-six during the leadership race.8 Moreover, he told Margaret Sinclair before they married that in recent years he had prayed every night for a wife and a family. He was now forty-eight, an age when fatherhood becomes difficult and a first marriage rare. Would the prime minister’s office end those hopes forever?
On January 18 Trudeau set out on his tour to meet the provincial premiers, and an increasingly curious press followed him. Accompanied by Eddie Rubin, who openly promoted his minister, and the eminent constitutional specialist Carl Goldenberg, Trudeau’s tour was unexpectedly eventful and successful. W.A.C. “Wacky” Bennett, British Columbia’s Social Credit premier, ignored Trudeau’s statement that the two of them would not meet the press during the course of their confidential discussions. To everyone’s surprise, Bennett told the assembled journalists that Trudeau impressed him so much that “if he ever decides to move to British Columbia, there’s a place for him in my Cabinet.”
More important than Bennett’s praise was the endorsement from the equally eccentric Liberal premier of Newfoundland, Joey Smallwood. Observers expected that Smallwood would support Trade Minister Robert Winters, whom he knew well and who came from the Atlantic provinces. However, Winters had dithered about his candidacy, and this indecision exasperated Smallwood. When Smallwood met Trudeau on January 25, he immediately took him and his party to his private dining room, brought out a vintage Chambertin, asked Trudeau how to pronounce Chambertin properly, demanded that his colleagues try to match Trudeau’s elegant accent, and proceeded to entertain his guests with a breathless monologue ranging over many topics but centred on himself. When Trudeau’s assistants became anxious because the late hour meant that Trudeau would miss his visit to Nova Scotia, Smallwood called Nova Scotia premier G.I. Smith and asked him to join the party, where the wine—Smallwood called it “syrup”—was flowing freely.
Smith refused, and eventually the federal party took its leave. As he was departing, Carl Goldenberg, who knew Smallwood well, told the premier that Trudeau was the finest political philosopher in Parliament. Smallwood no doubt fancied himself as the finest on “The Rock” and immediately called a press conference so that Trudeau and he could match thoughts and wits. There in the lobby of the Confederation Building in St. John’s, a city Trudeau scarcely knew and with a premier he had never met before, Smallwood appeared to endorse Trudeau. He was, Smallwood declared, “the perfect Canadian” and the “most brilliant” MP of all. This bizarre performance was of fundamental importance to Trudeau because Smallwood controlled the votes as no other provincial premier did. His support for Trudeau in the leadership race would eventually provide the margin needed for the victory of Pierre Trudeau and the defeat of Bob Winters.9
After a brief visit with Premier Louis Robichaud of New Brunswick, Trudeau went directly to the Quebec Liberal Federation meeting in Montreal, where Marchand and Lalonde made sure that Trudeau would play the central role. Even in the absence of the leadership contest, he would have attracted attention because of the constitutional issues that Lester Pearson and Quebec premier Daniel Johnson identified as the principal concerns of their governments. Moreover, the proposed Criminal Code revisions,
particularly those respecting abortion and homosexuality, were causing increasing criticism in rural Quebec and within the Roman Catholic Church. Both the Constitution and the Criminal Code were Trudeau’s responsibility, and both created dangers and opportunities for him in his bid to become the Canadian prime minister.
The “committee” to elect Trudeau met for the first time at the home of the thirty-seven-year-old Marc Lalonde on January 25, just as Smallwood was giving his major endorsement of the Trudeau campaign. Donald Macdonald, an Ontario MP three years younger than Lalonde but close to the powerful Walter Gordon, reported that seventy Ontario delegates were already assured. Pelletier said that Quebec would provide “at least 450.” Trudeau’s committee members were young, eager to bring their generation to the party’s forefront. Seniors had long prevailed there—Louis St. Laurent was sixty-six when he was chosen in 1948, and Lester Pearson was sixty-one in 1958. The sixties were different: in the United States, John Kennedy called for the torch to be passed to a new generation, while in Quebec, forty-five-year-old René Lévesque was wooing the youth into a swelling separatist force. Trudeau’s new voice needed to be heard to win this essential Quebec support. Lalonde and Marchand made sure that Trudeau was the only respondent to questions about “special status” on the panel on Canadian federalism sponsored by the Quebec Liberal Federation on Sunday, January 28—just in time for the Monday media.10
The newspapers the following morning reported how Trudeau had brilliantly outlined the federalist option and how the delegates jumped to their feet, applauded, and sang, “Il a gagné ses épaulettes.” Even Claude Ryan of Le Devoir, who was increasingly critical of Trudeau’s rejection of the concept of special status, admitted that Trudeau had been most impressive. Where delegates had expected a cold, distant, and abstract intellectual, they heard a remarkable communicator “capable, without oratorical artifice, of raising to a degree of lucidity and simplicity, an accomplishment that is perhaps the apex of eloquence in our times.”11 This surprising reaction, given Ryan’s doubts about Trudeau’s constitutional views, surely gave Trudeau more confidence, but he was not yet ready to declare.