Citizen of the World

by John English

  If I try to assess what happened in the past two months, I have a suspicion you people [the press] had a lot to do with it. If anybody’s to blame, I suppose it’s you collectively. If there’s anybody to thank, it’s you collectively. To be quite frank, if I try to analyze it, well, I think in the subconscious mind of the press … it started out like a huge practical joke on the Liberal Party. I mean that, because, in some sense, the decision that I made this morning and last night is in some ways similar to that I arrived at when I entered the Liberal Party. It seemed to me, reading the press in the early stages a couple of months ago, it seemed to me as though many of you were saying, you know, “We dare the Liberal Party to choose a guy like Trudeau. Of course, we know they never will, but we’ll just dare them to do it and we’ll show that this is the man they could have had as leader if they had wanted. Here’s how great he is.”

  The press, Trudeau continued, then said that the Liberals did not have the guts to choose the “good guy.” Now, the joke had blown up in the media’s many faces and in his own face:

  You know, people took it seriously. I saw this when—not when the press thought I had a chance, and that I should go, and so on—but when I saw the response from political people, from members of the party and responsible members of parliament. This is when I began to wonder if, oh, you know, this whole thing was not a bit more serious than you and I had intended. And when members of parliament formed committees to draft me, and when I got responsible Liberals in responsible positions in different parts of the country telling me seriously that I should run, I think what happened is that the joke became serious … So I was stuck with it. Well, you’re stuck with me.

  Stick to Trudeau they did, until he finally became prime minister of Canada less than two months later.21

  Trudeau’s hesitations had irritated many friends and puzzled the other candidates. The pattern was familiar to some, such as Pelletier and Marchand, who recalled earlier examples of Trudeau’s reluctance. Yet the stakes were higher and, as Pelletier told Trudeau, he had spent a lifetime preparing for the political career now within his grasp. This time Pelletier could not “guess what was going on in the conscience, the emotions, the inner depths of a friend, even when one had known him for twenty years.” His friend had refused to peel away the carefully constructed layers that shielded his emotional core. But despite his supporters’ concerns, Trudeau had good reason to consider his decision carefully.

  To begin, the one person whose consent he valued most had fallen silent. On weekends he would return to the family home, see his mother with her polished nails, perfect coiffure, elegant but conservative dress, take her hand and speak softly, but now she had no answers. Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia had closed Grace Trudeau’s excellent mind at the very moment when her fondest dream was about to be realized. Trudeau was more alone than ever before.

  Moreover, he was rightly wary of the media enthusiasm for his campaign. He knew that this embrace could chill quickly, as it had for Diefenbaker or Lesage, whose charisma had lasted but a fleeting moment. Journalist Leslie Roberts, a supporter, feared that the media’s “constantly repetitive use of that idiotic word ‘charisma’” could cause a counter-reaction through which Trudeau “could easily be laughed back to seventh place in the twelve-man league of leadership contenders by his own best friends.”22 Trudeau himself worried that he was simply an “epiphenomenon,” a phantom floating above the reality of Canadian politics—a reality he barely knew. He also knew that his past had secrets that could quickly capture the front pages of all the dailies. Already, the maverick Toronto Liberal Ralph Cowan was passing around translations of Trudeau’s bitter 1963 attack on the “defrocked prince of peace” Lester Pearson, and he promised more revelations. Trudeau, the scourge of separatists and the most eloquent supporter of a secular state in the sixties, had endorsed an independent, Catholic “Laurentie” in the early 1940s. He had championed Pétain and urged violence. Many who now loathed him knew his past. Would they reveal it? How would it affect him?

  In fact, he didn’t appear to care. When asked on a Radio-Canada late-night comedy show to name his favourite author, he answered “Niccolò Machiavelli”—a startling choice for a democratic aspirant. But it amused him and, apparently, his audience.23 Politics, he seemed to be saying to himself and to others, could be playful.

  Finally, Trudeau valued his privacy and often reacted to attacks in a decidedly personal manner—as in his protracted dispute with Father Braun in the early fifties over his trip to the Soviet Union. When he became a political celebrity in the winter of 1968, the gossip, jealousy, and suspicion that invariably attach themselves to prominence quickly abounded. Christina McCall, who knew Ottawa well in those days, remembered the Conservative candidate in the Beauce who, in denouncing Trudeau’s legislation regarding homosexuality, said that the bill was “for queers and fairies,” adding, gratuitously, that Trudeau was a bachelor. Walter Gordon told McCall that, when he confronted Trudeau in the House of Commons lobby about the many rumours of his own homosexuality, Trudeau reacted angrily and suggested that the men making the charge should leave him alone with their wives for a couple of hours. According to one reliable source, Pearson himself asked a close associate of Trudeau whether the justice minister was a homosexual. The infamous Canadian Intelligence Service, which had linked Pearson with Communist spy rings, began to transfer its attention to Trudeau, who had already made appearances in its pages.24

  To these largely personal concerns, Trudeau now added a shrewd political assessment: it was by no means certain that he would win the leadership and the election to follow. The Progressive Conservative lead in the polls was 6 percent, and the Liberal leadership campaign was already proving divisive. Moreover, the “draft Trudeau” campaign could identify only seven hundred supporters; he would need to attract about five hundred more to win the leadership. Neither he nor Marchand knew the party beyond Quebec, and they had to rely on the assessment of others to estimate his support. Surely all those church suppers, summer barbeques, and favours rendered over thirty-three years of Liberal service meant something for Paul Martin’s candidacy! Was the party a largely hollow shell waiting to be filled with enthusiastic newcomers? Did it matter that his most eminent academic supporter in English Canada, the historian Ramsay Cook, had been a longtime supporter of the CCF-NDP and, in a 1965 private letter, had criticized Trudeau’s affiliation with the Liberals while welcoming his presence in Ottawa? The political times were not normal or predictable. And it was fortunate for Trudeau they were not.

  Trudeau announced his candidacy on Friday, February 16, and, three days later, the Liberal government was defeated on a budget item in the House of Commons. In the House, Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp and Acting Prime Minister Robert Winters had decided to go ahead on a third-reading vote against the advice of Allan MacEachen, the Liberal expert on House rules. The bells rang, the Conservatives rounded up members the Liberals thought were absent, and the Liberals lost the vote. Normally, that would mean the defeat of the government and an immediate election, presumably with Lester Pearson leading the Liberals in the campaign.

  Pearson was holidaying in Jamaica, and three leadership candidates were absent. Pearson, “shocked and enraged,” flew home and berated his colleagues for their irresponsible actions. He then persuaded Robert Stanfield to agree to a twenty-four-hour adjournment of the House. It was a fatal error for the Conservative leader, one the highly partisan John Diefenbaker would never have made. As Walter Gordon later said, all “Stanfield had to do … was to get up and walk out of the House [saying]: ‘The Government is defeated; there is nothing more to do here.’” But Stanfield hesitated and lost. Pearson counterattacked, managed to delay the vote of confidence on the narrow item of the Monday night vote, and convinced the Créditistes to reverse their vote. Throughout the crisis, Trudeau gave constitutional law advice to Pearson and the Cabinet and performed coolly in the House of Commons in defending the government’s st
and. Immediately, he benefited most from the whole dramatic event.25 The leadership race continued, but Mitchell Sharp’s campaign had been mortally wounded.26

  The press reacted sharply to the chaos in Liberal ranks. It confirmed for Trudeau the grumbling of his supporters Marc Lalonde and Michael Pitfield about the poor organization of the Pearson government and validated his belief that a more rational approach to politics was essential. Rationality in government became a major theme of the Trudeau campaign. The sudden weakness of the Sharp campaign caused a stir among conservative Liberal supporters, especially in the business community. At the 1966 Liberal policy convention, Sharp had successfully presented himself as the opponent of both Walter Gordon’s nationalism and left-wing tendencies in the party. The rapid expansion of Canadian social programs in the mid-sixties had taken a toll on the government’s finances, and Sharp had proposed postponing the inauguration of medicare for one more year. After the week of February 19, it was difficult to imagine Sharp becoming leader, and the conservative and business faction of the Liberal Party began to worry.

  Suddenly a movement developed in the Senate to draft Robert Winters, who had dismissed a run for the leadership in early January and had himself been implicated in the disastrous decision to hold the vote. His role there appeared to be forgotten, and Winters responded to the draft, offering his resignation to Pearson on February 28 and announcing his candidacy the following day (February 29 in this leap year). He spoke in terms his supporters understood: “I have always believed that if you don’t agree with the policies of a firm, you either get out or take it over.”27 He would be the candidate for fiscal rectitude and against government excess.

  The first polls that appeared in early March were taken in early February. They showed Paul Martin in the lead, but Trudeau, who had not then even announced, stood a remarkable second. The results were very encouraging, but Martin had a strong organization, while Trudeau’s was still informal. Trudeau’s campaign team was decidedly amateurish, with Pelletier as the policy coordinator, Jean-Pierre Goyer in charge of convention arrangements, Jim Davey as leadership campaign coordinator, Pierre Levasseur as the Ottawa operations manager, and Gordon Gibson, the son of a wealthy British Columbia political legend, as Trudeau’s handler and travelling companion. Though short on political experience, they were bright, ambitious, and willing to try novel approaches, in part because they didn’t know the traditional ones. But who could be sure the new approaches would work? Moreover, on March 1 the Trudeau campaign fund had collected only $6,500.

  After Winters’s announcement, the characteristically pessimistic Pelletier wrote in his diary on March 6: “Trudeau’s victory seems to me most uncertain.” He was repelled by “the high degree of fabrication and mythology” that surrounded Trudeau as a candidate, a “personage” who bore “no resemblance to the fellow I’ve know for twenty years under the name of Pierre Trudeau.” Yet what peeved Pelletier astounded and intrigued others. And there was another factor: the candidate Pierre Trudeau was not the man Pelletier had so long known.

  Pelletier had worried about Trudeau’s bitter sarcasm and unexpected cruelty in debate. What he saw once the campaign began was a “cool” Trudeau, slow to anger and amused and tolerant when journalists attacked. When television interviewers Pierre O’Neil and Louis Martin unfairly accused Trudeau of having no support in Quebec, he “stayed cool” and “replied that we should wait and see.” When they rudely interrupted him before he answered, he simply smiled. Moreover, the timidity that Trudeau usually exhibited at social events disappeared in the midst of the adoring crowds that greeted him during the leadership tour. At the launches for the two books hastily assembled by his supporters from his previous writings, Federalism and the French Canadians and Réponses, Trudeau astounded both his old friends and reporters as he kissed the numerous beautiful women present as enthusiastically as traditional politicians bussed babies. At least, in this new political phenomenon of kissing adult women, he did bring much experience.

  Out on the campaign trail, reporters vied with each other to spin the tastiest tales. A desk clerk at a Sudbury hotel was so stunned by Trudeau’s handshake that she forgot to make change. A MacEachen supporter declared, on seeing Trudeau, that rather than meeting him she wanted to marry him, forgetting that her husband stood nearby. A middle-aged woman in a meeting at the National Library became so nervous in asking her question that she placed the microphone in her ear. A playful Trudeau answered with the microphone in his own ear. In British Columbia the wife of the president of the Liberal Federation, a Hellyer supporter, told reporters that the party needed a new leader who was not stodgy. “And anyway,” she continued, “I think he’s sexy.” Everyone knew she meant Trudeau. Soon Trudeau was dubbed the candidate of the Age of Aquarius—he wore a rose in his lapel just as hippies wore flowers in their hair. He promised he’d open 24 Sussex Drive to parties and, when asked who would be the hostess, he replied: “Why should there be only one?”28 Woodstock was not far away.

  Trudeau’s new “personage” carried the message that he would be different. He ran for office among the finest group of politicians ever to contest a party leadership in Canada, and he stood out above them all. The issues identified with him—specifically, the reform of the Criminal Code, the Constitution, and Quebec—reflected the spirit of a country that wanted to change and, in the case of Quebec, knew it must change. His high-contrast campaign posters, which, against the advice of the campaign executive, were commissioned by two remarkable young women, Alison Gordon and Jennifer Rae, were also strikingly different. Years later they were “the most coveted souvenirs of the leadership race.”29 In the Toronto Star, Peter Newman recognized the significance of Trudeau’s announcement the very day it was made: “Two years ago, in pre-Expo Canada it would have been almost impossible to imagine [Trudeau] as a serious contender. Now, we don’t have to go on muttering hopefully, ‘the times they are achangin.’ The times have changed.”

  Trudeau’s Criminal Code amendments and, more important, his clear explanations of the reasons for the changes—“the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation” and “what may be sin to some is not law for all”—contrasted strongly with the ambiguity with which his opponents approached the same issues. Norman Spector, then a left-leaning McGill student, expressed the view of youth and the spirit of change when he wrote a letter to the Montreal Star on January 12:

  The reforms which have been instituted in recent weeks by the Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau should meet with the approval of all thinking Canadians. Without a doubt our minister of justice is an intellectual of the first order.

  To those of us who have reached the conclusion that the Liberal party had grown staid and stodgy, the reforms of the Criminal Code come somewhat as a surprise. Is this the same Liberal party which is procrastinating so needlessly before inaugurating medicare? Is this the party which elevates Robert Winters and ostracizes Walter Gordon? Have the Liberals finally seen the light?

  For many of the young, the unorthodox and stylish challenge of Pierre Trudeau had become the light that illuminated a new Canada.

  For others, such as his old acquaintances Daniel Johnson and Claude Ryan, Trudeau’s accession to the Liberal leadership would thrust Canada into a new darkness. The first spat came with Johnson soon after Trudeau announced his candidacy. The Quebec premier focused on a flippant comment Trudeau had made that the French taught in Quebec was “lousy”—there was “a state of emergency as regards language” in Quebec which its government ignored. This remark contrasted strongly with the politeness that Trudeau exhibited in challenging his Liberal leadership opponents. Johnson replied acidly, claiming that the election of Trudeau would mean the death of Canada. Trudeau encouraged English Canadians to retain “backward and retrograde attitudes” towards Quebec. He called Trudeau “Lord Elliott” and compared his remarks to those of Lord Durham, who had famously encouraged the assimilation of French Canada in 1839.

  Trudeau responded quickly an
d pointed out that his goal, in contrast to Durham’s, was to gain equality for the French language throughout Canada. He challenged Johnson directly: “I think this shows how afraid he is of the people of Quebec becoming interested in federal politics. If they do, then he knows he won’t be lord and master over all Quebec.” For good measure, he added that “calling me Lord Elliott when his name is Johnson is … a sticky wicket.” To another critic, he simply and effectively replied: “When the king is naked, I say that the king is naked.” Trudeau not only won the debate with Johnson but also gained attention and support in English Canada. A poll of Alberta delegates revealed a surge of support for Trudeau, who was increasingly seen as the best candidate to confront Quebec separatism and nationalism.30

  The clarity of purpose that impressed many Albertans troubled others. Claude Ryan began to criticize him daily in Le Devoir for his rigidity. The dispute with Johnson infuriated Ryan, who warned English Canadians that they were mistaken in believing that Trudeau was a “Messiah” who would lead them out of the constitutional wilderness. He argued against Trudeau’s constitutional stand and emphasized that the two provincial parties were united in their support for special status. Another international issue with serious implications for the special status of Quebec appeared with the invitation from the African state of Gabon for Quebec to participate in an educational conference among francophone states. Trudeau took a hard line, pointing out that foreign affairs was a federal responsibility, and he even provoked Pelletier, who wanted a compromise in which Quebec could form part of the Canadian delegation to the conference. Nevertheless, his strong statement against “French interference” so soon after Charles de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” speech reinforced his image as the key opponent to special status and special rights for Quebec.