DEDICATION
For Michael, Anna, Helena, and Laura
EPIGRAPH
I consider nationalism to have been a sinister activity in world history over the last 150 years. And that goes for English-Canadian nationalism, French-Canadian nationalism, or Gaullist nationalism, or whatever.
—Pierre Trudeau, 1968
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PREFACE
PROLOGUE TRUDEAU TO THE GALLOWS!
CHAPTER ONE THE STUBBORN ECCENTRIC
CHAPTER TWO THE THREE MUSKETEERS
CHAPTER THREE FORKS IN THE ROAD
CHAPTER FOUR FROM CELEBRATION TO SURVIVAL
CHAPTER FIVE THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
CHAPTER SIX NOW YOU’RE STUCK WITH ME
CHAPTER SEVEN WE WANT TRUDEAU!
CHAPTER EIGHT TELLING IT LIKE IT IS
CHAPTER NINE A MAN FOR TOMORROW
CHAPTER TEN THE CALM AFTER THE STORM
EPILOGUE TRUDEAUMANIA 2.0
NOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ROBERT WRIGHT
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PREFACE
He haunts us no longer. Nearly twenty years after his death and more than thirty since his retirement from active politics, Pierre Elliott Trudeau is at long last receding from the lived memory of Canadians. His son Justin is the current occupant of 24 Sussex Drive, but as he has demonstrated from the moment he entered politics in 2008, he is his own man. Pierre did not live to see Justin take even his first step into public life, and he never sought it. “Our family has done enough,” he told his boys.
Trudeaumania is about Pierre Trudeau’s rise to power in 1968. Like many Canadians, perhaps, I thought I knew this story—the epic saga of the hipster Montrealer who drove up to Ottawa in his Mercedes in 1965, wowed the country with his dictum that “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” rocked the new medium of television like no one since JFK, and in scant months rode the crest of Canadians’ centennial-era euphoria into power. This is Canadians’ own Camelot myth. It embodies the quirkiness, the passion, and the youthful exuberance we ascribe to the 1960s even now. Many of us cherish it. I confess that, as a professional historian, I have been casually reproducing this mythology myself since I first started writing about the sixties over three decades ago.
Unfortunately, it is almost entirely wrong.
Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 victory owed almost nothing to the heady vibes that had washed over North America during 1967’s summer of love. By the frigid winter of 1968, the emotional highs of Canada’s own Expo 67 were already a distant memory, eclipsed by the continuing violence of the Front de libération du Québec, the appalling atrocities of the Vietnam War, massive civil unrest on both sides of Europe’s Iron Curtain, and, above all, the disintegration of American civil society after the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Peruse virtually any newspaper from this period. What you will find there is the world aflame, figuratively and literally.
It is true that Pierre Trudeau’s entry into federal politics came as a breath of fresh air after John Diefenbaker and Lester B. Pearson. Many young Canadians (the so-called teenyboppers) were enamoured of Trudeau’s high cheekbones and ice-blue eyes, and he obliged them with smiles and kisses. Many older Canadians were impressed with the pedigree he carried to Ottawa—his fluent multilingualism, his high-flying record of academic and athletic achievement, his world travels, his straight talk, even his sartorial flair.
But Trudeau did not triumph in June 1968 through charisma and cunning, as his critics claim. He neither ingratiated himself with Canadians nor sought their affections. Indeed, throughout the period of Trudeaumania, he fretted that his campaign team was exciting expectations that he could never meet.
Trudeau vaulted to political stardom because he provided both a cogent diagnosis of the crises facing Canada and the world, and a uniquely Canadian set of solutions born of decades of study and debate. By the time he ventured to Ottawa in 1965, just weeks before his forty-sixth birthday, the essentials of Trudeau’s vision for Canada were firmly in place: the separation of church and state; the need to distinguish between sin and crime; the rejection of nationalism in all of its forms; the primacy of individual rights, including language rights, in a Constitution that would bind not only citizens but also governments; and the establishment of a culture of bilingualism across Canada paired with the uncompromising rejection of biculturalism (what Quebecers called deux nations).
In 1968, Trudeau put forward this vision of Canada, without guile, without dissembling, and without a hard sell. Take it or leave it, he told Canadians. If you do not like my ideas, vote for someone else.
We took it.
Trudeaumania is the second of my books to foreground the life of Pierre Trudeau. It is also the second in which the perennial debate over Quebec’s place in Canada provides the backdrop. Trudeau told a group of lawyers in 1967 that one should approach the latter only with “fear and trembling.” I am not a lawyer, but I consider this sage advice.
In writing this book, I have been mindful of three considerations: to get the story right, to treat all of its principal characters fairly, and to allow them to speak for themselves wherever possible. For ease of reading, I have taken one minor liberty with the text. I have closed extended excerpts without ellipses and square brackets in instances where I judged continuity and context to be unaffected. In every other respect, the sources cited in the endnotes conform to established scholarly standards. There is no invented dialogue in this book. All translations from the original French are my own unless otherwise noted.
Trudeaumania could not have been written without the help of others. It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge them here. Research funding was provided by the Symons Trust Fund for Canadian Studies, to which I am indebted. For putting themselves at my disposal early on in my research, I am grateful to Professor Geneviève Dorais, Bev Slopen, and especially Rianna Genore. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my research assistants, Nicholas Ashmore, Damien Cardinal, and especially Anna Harrington. Thanks as well to John Wales and Ken Field of the Trent University Durham Library, and to Heather Gildner of the Toronto Public Library. For granting me access to the archival papers of the late Pierre Trudeau, I am indebted to Sacha Trudeau and Marc Lalonde. For making that access navigable and indeed enjoyable, I thank Michael MacDonald and Alix McEwen of Library and Archives Canada. Thanks as well to Dan Wright, Stacey Young, Patricia Taylor, Louis Balthazar, Barbara Nichol, Linda McQuaig, Rena Zimmerman, Leo Groarke, Marilyn Burns, Joe Muldoon, Kate Ingram, Amber Ashton, and Hailey Wright.
Trudeaumania is the fourth book I have written under the sharp eye of my friend and editor Jim Gifford. I extend to Jim, Iris Tupholme, Noelle Zitzer, Lisa Rundle, Rebecca Vogan, and the rest of the team at HarperCollins Canada my warmest gratitude.
Ken Taylor passed away in October 2015, while Trudeaumania was in progress. Ken was a confidant, a steady source of inspiration, and a great friend. He was also a voracious reader who did me the favour, among many others, of reading and commenting on my work in manuscript form. Although he did not get the chance to read this book, he discussed its contents with me often—and with all of the enthusiasm and affection for which he was justly renowned. For that, I feel most fortunate.
Professors David Sheinin and Yvon Grenier read a manuscript draft of this book in its entirety, as did John Nichol, former president of the Liberal Party of Canada, and Andrew Potter, current director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. For their generosity and kindness, I am deeply indebted. I need hardly add the standard authorial caveat. I have tried to bri
ng balance and objectivity to the story of Trudeaumania, but where I have failed, I have done so single-handedly.
As always, this book is for my family, with my warmest gratitude and affection.
PROLOGUE
TRUDEAU TO THE GALLOWS!
The morning of Monday, June 24, 1968, Pierre Elliott Trudeau awakened in his Oshawa hotel room, pulled on some sweats, and, accompanied by two officers from his RCMP security detail, headed out to the gym.
This was to be the last day of a gruelling sixty-one-day election campaign that had seen the prime minister touch down in almost every strip mall or soccer field that could accommodate a helicopter. Trudeau’s Liberal Party was riding high in the polls and was almost certainly going to form the first majority government in a decade.
Trudeaumania—the Beatles-esque outpouring of adulation that greeted the prime minister everywhere he went, often in crowds numbering in the tens of thousands—had made this one of the most electrifying campaigns in Canadian history. But the cost to the man himself, famously protective of his personal freedom and his privacy, had been considerable. Trudeau had taken on the mantle of leadership in the wake of Lester Pearson’s retirement only a couple of months earlier. Yet, like his opponents, Tory leader Robert Stanfield and NDP leader Tommy Douglas, he was now utterly bored with his own stale talk and feeling mind-numbingly overexposed. Surely, the prime minister had earned an hour or two of precious solitude before heading out for one last day of campaign bedlam.
No such luck. Trudeau’s aides—a group of young “amateurs” who had clambered up Ottawa’s greasy pole alongside their candidate—insisted that he squeeze every last opportunity out of the dying campaign. There would be time enough for solitude after he won. Trudeau conceded the point as he had done repeatedly in recent weeks, sometimes in resignation, usually under protest.
Reporters and photographers, road-weary and hyper-caffeinated, crowded into the gym, dutifully recording Trudeau’s every move. They had the unenviable job of covering a politician who openly disparaged their profession. “I don’t read the press,” Trudeau had said at the beginning of the campaign. “So many bad things have been said about me that, now that they are saying good things, I try not to know about it. Because tomorrow they will start saying bad things again. That’s the way journalists are.”1 Out on the hustings, he had harangued the press corps about their sloppy reportage. They had returned the favour by capturing him in his most iconic moments—kissing the girls, flipping off diving boards, waving from open limos Kennedy-style. Now more than ever, as the campaign reached its crescendo, the media machine was insatiable. A photo op at a suburban gym was a perfect opportunity. Here was the Canadian prime minister, the epitome of Zen-master cool, doing calisthenics, riding a stationary bicycle in his bare feet, ambling into the steam room. Nothing Trudeau did, no matter how quotidian or banal, seemed beneath the notice of Canadians. He was endlessly fascinating—to everyone but himself. His ennui merely enhanced his mystique.
Smiling, stretching, and pedalling away, as flashbulbs flashed and journalists scribbled, the prime minister chatted effortlessly, revealing nothing of himself, as usual. Today, he was soft-spoken, witty, supremely self-confident, and completely under control. If he was feeling anxious, he gave no hint of it.
As his nearby security detail knew, however, all was not well. The previous evening, the Montreal newspaper Dimanche-Dernière Heure had run a front-page story alleging that a cell of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was planning to assassinate the prime minister. One Felquiste was quoted as saying, “We shall kill Trudeau Monday”—that very day.2 According to the report, the Mounties were aware of the threat, knew the person who had made it, and had him under “close surveillance.” At several Montreal radio stations and at the city’s Canadian Press bureau, similar threats on Trudeau’s life had been made anonymously. With the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy agonizingly fresh in Canadians’ minds—King had been murdered in early April, Kennedy in early June—such threats on the life of the Canadian prime minister were taken not merely seriously but with grim foreboding.
Certainly, there was no mystery about the timing of the threats. In late May, officials of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste of Montreal had invited Trudeau to watch the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade, held annually on June 24, from the official reviewing platform. Trudeau’s tough stand against Quebec nationalism had hardly endeared him to members of the Société.3 Yet they felt a duty to extend the invitation, and he felt an obligation to accept it.
The moment it was announced that the prime minister would appear alongside Quebec VIPs, Pierre Bourgault, the outspoken leader of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (RIN), issued a statement of his own. He and his separatist comrades would use “all possible force and all means necessary” to thwart Trudeau’s appearance.4 Trudeau’s friend and booster, the historian Ramsay Cook, told him that it would be “a risky provocation” to confront separatists in the home stretch of a campaign he had already won. He would do well to invent a “prior engagement” as an excuse for not appearing.5 Trudeau ignored his friend’s advice. He had never cowered when threatened with violence, and he was hardly about to start now.
A journalist asked Trudeau whether his decision to attend the parade would be seen as an affront to Quebec sovereignists. “Some say that,” he replied, “but don’t you think the prime minister has a right to be at a popular event?”6
As for Ramsay Cook, he later admitted that his wise counsel had missed by a mile. “Obviously, I did not know Trudeau as well as I thought,” he mused.7
The origins of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day—or la fête nationale as it is known to French-speaking Quebecers—date back to the early seventeenth century, when the French presence in North America was in its infancy. Traditionally, the fête has been celebrated with bonhomie and revelry. In the mid-twentieth century, bonfires, speechmaking, feasting, and singalongs were standard fare, capped off by a family-friendly défilé (parade) along Montreal’s rue Sherbrooke. During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, when Quebecers first demanded that they be maîtres chez nous, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day acquired a political salience that has persisted to the present. Thus, although it remains primarily an occasion to celebrate Québécois culture, la fête nationale is also an opportunity for Quebec sovereignists to promote their dream of independence and for opponents of sovereignty to mount their own public protests. Violence has darkened Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day more often than Quebec officials would wish.
There was no mistaking the mounting tension in the streets of Montreal on June 24, 1968. City workers spent the day building a reviewing stand the full length of the great stone steps of the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Montréal. An imposing classical structure on the south side of Sherbrooke at Montcalm, the building served as Montreal’s main public library until it was supplanted in 2005 by the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec on Berri. (In 2009, the original bibliothèque, now beautifully restored, was renamed Édifice Gaston-Miron after the Quebec poet.)
The placement of the VIP reviewing stand was a gift to Pierre Bourgault, who intended to hold a mass rally to protest Trudeau’s presence on this most hallowed of holidays. The platform faced north, overlooking the deep sidewalks and broad boulevards that merge at Sherbrooke and Cherrier to form a single expansive tarmac. Beyond the pavement, roughly eighty metres from the steps of the library, lay Parc La Fontaine, a green space of stolid statues and rolling hills that is today the preserve of Sunday-morning dog walkers. The south-facing slopes of the park rise gently in a shallow-bowl configuration, providing several acres of open lawns perfectly suited to the sort of demonstration envisaged by Bourgault. He was hoping that as many as five thousand separatist protesters would answer the call. If they did, Parc La Fontaine could not only accommodate them but afford them the strategic advantage of easy manoeuvre on foot. Seen from the vantage of the prime minister’s bodyguards, the site was a security nightmare.
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The parade itself was scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. It was expected to attract at least 100,000 flag-waving spectators of all ages. Estimates of the number of Quebecers who actually lined the streets on that balmy June evening would later range as high as 400,000—roughly one-quarter of Montreal’s population.
The promise of violent separatist demonstrations and now death threats against the prime minister preoccupied Mayor Jean Drapeau and the hundreds of civic and police officials charged with keeping public order. Yet Jean-Paul Gilbert, Montreal’s forty-eight-year-old chief of police, was imperturbable. He had seen his fair share of heated demonstrations since taking on the job in 1965. Roughly a thousand uniformed police officers would line the parade route. Another 250 plainclothes officers were assigned to protect the VIPs, in addition to an RCMP security detail of sixty men assigned to Trudeau. By the dinner hour, police cruisers were patrolling the parade route. Motorcycle and mounted units were standing by. A press box, strategically located across the street from the reviewing stand, ensured that, whatever happened, it would be recorded in real time.
Beginning in the late afternoon, boisterous young Quebecers filed into Parc La Fontaine and staked out their positions across from the library facade. By 8 p.m., when the crowd was at its largest, the demonstrators numbered roughly one thousand—a far cry from Bourgault’s promised five thousand but a formidable mob nonetheless. Most of the youths would be described condescendingly in the mainstream press as “scruffy.” Their average age was estimated to be seventeen.
Waving separatist placards and banners, the crowd chanted “Québec aux Québécois!” and “Vive le Québec libre!” The reviewing stand remained mostly vacant, but the security cordon surrounding it was imposing. The inevitable storm gained energy as the protesters taunted the police and the police stared down the protesters. Suddenly, a pop-pop-pop sound rang out. A girl fell to the ground, injured by what turned out to be firecrackers and not gunfire. Uniformed police moved in on the crowd. One of the approaching officers suffered an eye injury when a firecracker was thrown directly into his face. Undercover officers planted among the demonstrators pointed out the provocateurs. White-helmeted police then converged on the youths, subduing some of them with nightsticks and hauling them off to waiting paddy wagons. Chants of “Gestapo, Gestapo!” filled the air.
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