by John English
The other candidates noticed the swelling opposition to Trudeau in Quebec ranks and began to criticize him. Mitchell Sharp, for example, attacked Trudeau’s harsh exchange with Johnson, while Paul Martin Sr. argued that a prime minister must be “a man who has not clouded relations with any prominent government or provincial premier.” Once again, Trudeau benefited from the simplicity of his constitutional stand: linguistic equality enshrined in a charter of human rights. In the classic formulation of the French scientist and writer Comte de Buffon, the style became the political man.31
Gérard Pelletier was finally convinced of the political worth of Trudeau’s new personage when his old friend visited his riding of Hochelaga. His previous appearances there had been listless, but this time Trudeau was confident, poised, and the object of adoration. It proved for Pelletier the “American” maxim that “nothing succeeds like success.” The excitement in Hochelaga reminded him of what Trudeau had said to him after he was mobbed in Victoria. There, when his campaigners asked him how he managed to smile all day long, he did not dare tell them the truth. But he confided to Pelletier: “It would have been harder not to smile. I found it all so odd, grotesque, almost hilarious.”
Odd and hilarious it may have been, but it was working. Thanks to the efforts of Marchand, the Quebec support finally materialized with thirty-one MPs agreeing to support him publicly after a March 6 meeting. In a confidential survey of MPs carried out in mid-March, Trudeau received support from thirty-eight of the eighty-seven MPs who replied. Hellyer, who had won the first delegate-selection meetings in Toronto, had the support of fifteen; Winters, thirteen; Martin, eleven; Turner and MacEachen, four each; and Sharp and Greene, one each. Trudeau, moreover, was the second choice of nineteen, followed by Winters, with fifteen. In the last week before the convention, the campaign became, very simply, Trudeau against the rest.32
Walter Gordon finally endorsed Trudeau on March 26, although he admitted he was troubled by Trudeau’s opposition to economic nationalism. And Joey Smallwood officially supported Trudeau, a fact he had confided to almost every journalist in Newfoundland. Members of parliament Bryce Mackasey and Edgar Benson took the leadership in his campaign and provided valuable political experience for the last days. Then fortune fell unexpectedly in Trudeau’s path: Mitchell Sharp withdrew from the campaign and threw his support to Trudeau.
A complex string of events lay behind this move. Sharp had tried to reinvigorate his campaign in the last half of March, but the crowds were meagre and his heart was weak. As his well-financed organization polled the delegates, it quickly learned that Sharp’s support had evaporated. After the budget crisis in February, Sharp had spoken with Pearson about withdrawing and asked the prime minister what he thought of Trudeau. Pearson said he was impressed but puzzled, a factor that persuaded Sharp to stay in the race. Rumours of this discussion leaked to the Trudeau camp. Marchand, in a gesture that betrayed considerable naïveté, then approached Sharp to say that he and Trudeau should run a joint campaign, with the caucus deciding who should become leader. Although Sharp was identified with the conservative and business wing of the party, he had lost respect for Robert Winters. When Winters indicated in January 1968 that he had no intention of contesting the leadership, he gratuitously added that the finances of Canada were in bad shape and poorly handled. Sharp, as finance minister, took the remarks personally and asked for an apology. Winters apologized in a private letter, but then destroyed its political impact by refusing to allow Sharp to release it.
Sharp met Pearson again in late March and told him that he now had a higher opinion of Trudeau. Pearson said he did too. So, on April 3, the convention’s eve, Sharp endorsed Trudeau, and Sharp’s supporters Jean-Luc Pepin, Jean Chrétien, and Bud Drury also joined Trudeau’s team. All three were political gems—Pepin because he was an elegant and charming orator, Chrétien for his extraordinary campaign skills, and Drury for his ties with business.
The news fuelled a wild Trudeau rally at the cavernous Chaudière nightclub across the Ottawa River. There the irrepressible Joey Smallwood declared that “Pierre is better than medicare—the lame have only to touch his garments to walk again.”33
On Thursday, April 4, the convention’s first day, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King in a Memphis motel and riots swept through large American cities as his murderer fled to Toronto. The tragedy provoked sombre thoughts but did not deaden the excitement surrounding the policy workshops in Ottawa. Trudeau’s crowds were the largest, crammed with mini-skirted youthful enthusiasm. The tribute to Lester Pearson that evening ended with the bizarre gift of a puppy and, to the retiring leader’s embarrassment, Maryon Pearson’s strong hint of affection for Trudeau.
The next day came the speeches. Ottawa’s Civic Centre was crammed, television booms and cameras were everywhere, and streamers dangled from every rafter. Two fringe candidates, the Reverend Lloyd Henderson and Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, were not permitted to speak in the regular workshops but were restricted to a short session in which the trilingual Zündel condemned the historic mistreatment of French and German Canadians. On Friday evening, Trudeau was the target of the other speakers, who largely disappointed except for Joe Greene, who gave a populist “barnburner.” Paul Hellyer’s poor performance had a major impact later as voting delegates remembered his bland words.
With a speech drafted mainly by Tim Porteous, with French translation by Gérard Pelletier, Trudeau spoke well; Richard Stanbury thought only Greene was better, and none doubted that the Trudeau crowd was the largest and noisiest. He spoke for only nineteen of the permitted thirty minutes because his supporters demonstrated so long and vigorously. They continued to cheer him as he declared: “Liberalism is the only philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past; because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions; because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.” The message was typically clear: the Liberal future lay with Trudeau. It was both a promise and a warning.34
Trudeau began Saturday, the final day, with a pancake and maple syrup breakfast at the Château Laurier which six hundred delegates attended. As he left, he slid down the hotel’s grand staircase banister, to the delight of photographers and delegates alike.
Balloting began at 1:00 p.m. At 2:30 Senator John Nichol announced the results:
Greene 169
Hellyer 330
Kierans 103
MacEachen 165
Martin 277
Trudeau 752
Turner 277
Winters 293
Trudeau had met his team’s expectations; Paul Hellyer’s face began to drip with perspiration; Maurice Sauvé immediately bolted from his seat beside Paul Martin and pushed through the crowd towards Trudeau. Young historians Robert Bothwell and Norman Hillmer were shocked to see Claude Ryan begin to shake with rage in the press booth.35
Lloyd Henderson received no votes and was automatically eliminated, and Ernst Zündel had withdrawn before the ballot, but that meant the other candidates had to decide individually if they would step aside. Kierans and Paul Martin, who had led the leadership polls for so long, both withdrew graciously. MacEachen intended to withdraw but failed to notify Senator Nichol by the deadline, so, to the disappointment of the Trudeau camp, he remained on the second ballot. On that ballot, Trudeau moved up to 964, as he picked up most of MacEachen’s left-wing support. Winters finished second with 473 votes, Hellyer won a disappointing 465, while Turner rose to 347 and Greene fell to 104. The beneficial impact on Trudeau’s campaign of Mitchell Sharp’s withdrawal suddenly became obvious.
The two successful businessmen Hellyer and Winters conferred on what they should do to stop Trudeau. Despite Winters’s entreaties, Paul Hellyer refused to drop out—which would have cast the weight of his votes behind Winters. Winters then asked Judy LaMarsh, who supported Hellyer and loathed Trudeau, to have a word with Hellyer. Television
and boom microphones were new to Canadian politicians at the time. Unaware she was being overheard, a tearful LaMarsh, now wearing a Winters button, shouted at Hellyer: “It’s tough, Paul, but what the hell. Do you want that bastard taking over the party?” He didn’t, but, crucially, he did not withdraw.36
On the third ballot, Winters took 621 votes; Hellyer, 377. Trudeau, at 1,051, was only fifty-three ahead of their combined vote. Turner held onto 279, and Greene, at 29, was dropped. Had Hellyer spoken better on Friday evening, had Sharp not endorsed Trudeau, Paul Hellyer probably would have become Liberal leader. These are the “what ifs” of history, which intrigue but remain wistful dreams for losers. Hellyer did keep his promise to Winters that he would endorse him if Winters moved ahead on the third ballot. Enthusiastically waving a Winters banner, he began to chant “Go, Bob, go.” Joe Greene joined the crowded Trudeau box, where Trudeau coolly amused himself by tossing grapes in the air and catching them in his mouth as they fell. John Turner stubbornly refused to withdraw, and, as the final voting began at 8 p.m., most of the crowd erupted in shouts of “Trudeau. Canada. We want Trudeau.”
When Nichol began to read out the final results—Trudeau 1,203—the crowd exploded, drowning out the announcement of Winters, 954, and Turner, 195. Trudeau’s face momentarily and exuberantly beamed, then froze in silent contemplation.
What images swirled in Pierre Trudeau’s mind as the crowd swarmed around him as he moved slowly to the podium? Certainly he recalled the moment two days before when he spied in the crowd the beautiful young woman he had met on the beach in Tahiti, and he immediately broke away from his handlers to speak a few words to her. He probably thought of Thérèse Gouin Décarie, who, with her husband, had organized the academic petition for his candidacy at the Université de Montréal. And there were surely memories of those nights in Pelletier’s basement, drafting tracts that few read and many resented; of days in Paris dreaming of a Quebec that might be, and of summers at Old Orchard Beach with the family; of long nights when Papa brought home his political friends who argued long into the night, and of a mother who, in silence, still radiated her endless love for him. He reached the stage at the front of the convention hall, mounted the steps—and, suddenly, he smiled.
* Ramsay Cook was instrumental in organizing these petitions, but William Kilbourn got only one signature: Pierre Berton’s. Saywell, apparently, took little part in the campaign. At the University of Toronto, radical student activists Michael Ignatieff and his friend Bob Rae also rallied behind the Trudeau candidacy
* Pelletier believed that Trudeau spoke well, but he confided to his diary that Trudeau’s “tasteless jokes about France-Quebec relations” irritated him. He wondered whether they indicated a broader problem: “Making jokes (and Lord knows they’re easy to make) implies, after all, that France-Quebec relations are unimportant. Knowing what he actually thinks on the subject, I’d be happy if he spoke seriously. But I don’t understand the lack of sensitivity he puts on this matter, nor his apparent lack of respect for others’ feelings on the subject. Perhaps it’s a sign of his impatience.” Gérard Pelletier, Years of Choice, 1960–1968 (Toronto: Methuen, 1987), 264–65.
NOTES
Unless otherwise specified, all references to the Trudeau Papers are found in MG 26 02 at Library and Archives Canada.
CHAPTER ONE: TWO WORLDS
1. Isaac Starr, “Influenza in 1918: Recollections of the Epidemic in Philadephia,” Annals of Internal Medicine, Oct. 1976, 516.
2. Quoted in Jean-Claude Marsan, Montreal in Evolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), 256.
3. The population of Montreal in 1911 was only 25.7 percent English. The third largest group, the Jews, at 5.9 percent, tended to affiliate, nervously, with the English minority while building their own institutions to maintain their religious identity. See Paul-André Linteau, Histoire de Montréal depuis la Confédération (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2000), 162. The English group had fallen from 33.7 percent to 25.7 percent between 1901 and 1911.
4. Zweig is quoted in Gérard Bouchard, Les deux chanoines: Contradiction et ambivalence dans la pensée de Lionel Groulx (Montreal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2003), 38. Earlier, in 1904, the renowned French sociologist André Siegfried had visited Canada and declared Canadian politics corrupt, unable to rise above “the sordid preoccupations of patronage or connection.” How long, he asked, could Canadian politicians suppress the crisis that loomed before them? André Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada, trans. E. Nash (1907; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1966), 113.
5. Terry Copp, “Public Health in Montreal, 1870–1930,” in S.E.D. Shortt, ed., Medicine in Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1981), 395–416; and Martin Tétrault, “Les maladies de la misère: Aspects de la santé publique à Montréal, 1880–1914,” Revue d’histoire de 1’Amérique française 36 (March 1983): 507–26.
6. Grace Trudeau to Pierre Trudeau, March 30, 1948, Trudeau Papers (TP), MG 26 02, vol. 46, file 16, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).
7. The Clio Collective, Quebec Women: A History, trans. Roger Gannon and Rosalind Gill (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1987), 254–55.
8. “Philip” was the surname of Trudeau’s maternal grandfather. “Baby’s Days,” Baby Book 1919–1929, TP, vol. 1, file 14.
9. Ibid. In a contest in 1988 when members of the Prime Minister’s Office were asked to give his full name, Trudeau wrote “Joseph Yves Pierre Elliott? Trudeau”—and lost the prize. See Nancy Southam, ed., Pierre (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 64.
10. The Baby Book indicates that Trudeau held his head erect at two months, crept at eight months, and stood alone at eleven months. He had his first tooth on August 6, 1920, and his second on August 10. His first outing on a sleigh was on December 8, 1919, and his first trip to St-Rémi on December 13, 1919, when his grandfather, Joseph Trudeau, died. He had his tonsils removed on October 16, 1921. TP, vol. 1, file 14.
11. Charles Trudeau to Grace Trudeau, Aug. 17, 1921, TP, vol. 53, file 30.
12. Pierre Trudeau’s assessment of Charles is found in George Radwanski, Trudeau (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978), ch. 4. Other notable biographies of Trudeau that contain important family material, often drawing on the interviews Trudeau gave to Radwanski, are Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, vol. 1: The Magnificent Obsession (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), vol. 2: The Heroic Delusion (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994); and Michel Vastel, Trudeau: Le Québécois 2nd ed. (Montreal: Les Éditions de 1’Homme, 2000). See also Pierre Trudeau, Memoirs (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993).
13. Radwanski, Trudeau, 43.
14. Victor Barbeau, quoted in Claude Corbo, La mémoire du cours classique: Les années aigres-douces des récits autobiographiques (Outremont, Que.: Les Éditions Logiques, 2000), 33.
15. These comments and records are found in TP, vol. 1, files 1–6.
16. Trudeau, Memoirs, 6; Radwanski, Trudeau, 47.
17. Trudeau, Memoirs, 10–13.
18. Vastel, Trudeau, 22–23. Clarkson’s recent comment is in John English, Richard Gwyn, and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, eds., The Hidden Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Faith behind the Politics (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004), 33. For the friend’s recollection, see Clarkson and McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, 1: 30. Max and Monique Nemni also doubt that Charles was abusive and paint a similar portrait to the one presented in this book. See Max and Monique Nemni, Trudeau: Fils du Québec, père du Canada, vol. 1: Les années de jeunesse, 1919–1944 (Montreal: Les Éditions de 1’Homme, 2006).
19. Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert, Quebec: A History, 1867–1929, trans. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1983), 345–47.
20. Charles Trudeau to Grace Trudeau, Aug. 17, 1921, TP, vol. 53, file 30.
21. Trudeau, Memoirs, 13. Also Radwanski, Trudeau, 44, and TP, vol. 53, file 31. On his club memberships and directorships, see Le Devoir,
April 11, 1935.
22. Interview between Pierre Trudeau and Ron Graham, April 18, 1992, TP, vol. 23, file 3. In this interview, Trudeau said that he thought the majority of the customers were the French elite. That probably was not the case, although the evidence is elusive.
23. Pierre Trudeau to Charles Trudeau, nd, TP, vol. 53, file 33.
24. Charles Trudeau to Pierre Trudeau, Sept. 28, 1926, and Charles to Pierre, May 1930, ibid., file 31.
25. Pierre Trudeau to Charles Trudeau, nd, and Charles to Pierre, July 19, 1929, ibid.
26. Pierre Trudeau to Charles Trudeau, ibid.
27. Pierre Trudeau to Charles and Grace Trudeau, March 10, 1935, and Pierre to Charles, April 8, 1935, ibid., file 33.
28. Trudeau, Memoirs, 30; Radwanski, Trudeau, 54.
29. Radwanski, Trudeau, 55.
30. Trudeau, Memoirs, 30.
31. Père Jean Belanger to Pierre Trudeau, April [12?] 1935, TP, vol. 41, file 1.
32. Trudeau gave this information to the painter. TP, vol. 23, file 6.
33. Radwanski, Trudeau, 55.
34. Le Devoir, April 15, 1935. The names are overwhelmingly francophone.
35. Pierre Trudeau to Grace Trudeau, April 28, May 2, and June 10, 1935, TP, vol. 2, file 5.
36. Vastel, Trudeau, 27.
37. Clarkson and McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, 1: 31.
38. Ibid.; Radwanski, Trudeau, 55–56.
39. TP, vol. 1, file 22.
40. Grace Pitfield wrote these comments to Christina McCall-Newman on October 26, 1974. Quoted in McCall-Newman, Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982), 65.