Trudeaumania
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Almost nothing in the public record or Trudeau’s private papers supports this claim. There was no grand design behind Pierre Trudeau’s rise to power, nor any method, covert or otherwise, for achieving it. Far from it. What emerges instead is a picture of a man painfully ambivalent about seeking the nation’s top office.
At every stage, Trudeau expressed serious reservations about his lack of political experience and doubts about what he could actually accomplish if he ever did lead a government. He vacillated right up to the day he declared his candidacy, February 16, 1968, making endless excuses for his own lack of conviction. Worse, he spoke and acted like a man who believed he could not win. When Trudeau finally agreed to throw his hat into the ring, he did so not as an imposter but as a straight shooter. In the parlance of the day, he told it like it was. He laid out his ideas, asked Canadians to reflect on them, and told them blithely that if they did not vote for him, he would neither blame them nor be disappointed. He could just as easily find other things to do.57 Out on the hustings, Trudeau campaigned without guile. He freely admitted when his own knowledge was too limited to give a sensible answer to a policy question—on aboriginal affairs, for example. He conceded when his own speeches were dull, sometimes while they were in progress. Almost unbelievably, he acknowledged publicly when he agreed with his opponents or when he had overstated his case against them.
It was a mystery, first to his Liberal leadership rivals and later to Robert Stanfield and Tommy Douglas, how Trudeau got away with this forthrightness. Whenever they committed such faux pas, they were pilloried as bumblers and rank amateurs. Were Canadians really so mesmerized by Trudeaumania, so much in need of a “messiah,” as Claude Ryan put it, that they were willing to give this untried playboy a shot?
Trudeau got away with it because his ideas about Canada and the world preceded him. As a curious youth, as an Ivy League student, and as a lawyer and professor, he had spent decades honing his ideas about Canadian federalism. When he vaulted into federal politics in Canada in the mid-1960s, he did so carrying a fully formed theory of constitutional government, language rights, and what we now call Charter rights. As his friend Gérard Pelletier said of him in 1967, “It is rare to find persons in whom an entire lifetime of study and meditation has resulted in a genuine theory of politics—that is, a complete and coherent system of responses based on a clear conception of men and society.”58 Not only his comrades expressed this view. In mid-June 1968, at the height of the election campaign, Canada’s most famous sociologist, John Porter, author of The Vertical Mosaic, pronounced on the corpus of Trudeau’s constitutional writing in the years before he entered politics. “I do not think I have ever read a more coherent, consistent and articulate blueprint for contemporary Canada than in this collection of papers,” Porter commented. “One is astounded at the clarity and the logic of it all.”59
Trudeau’s critics would later call his preoccupation with the Constitution his magnificent obsession. But what is striking about the evolution of his constitutional thinking in the 1960s is how measured and cautious it was. Although Trudeau had begun to formulate his idea of a “charter of human rights” as early as 1955, he spent the next decade telling Canadians, and particularly Quebecers, that such reforms were completely unnecessary.60 Forget about separatism, he said. The powers laid out in the 1867 British North America Act were perfectly adequate for Quebec to take its place in a vibrant and internationally competitive modern Canada. When Trudeau did finally accept the need to rewrite the Constitution, it was not because he sought to change it himself. It was because the pressure from Quebec City and indeed from Ottawa had grown so intense that he could not, even as minister of justice, contain it. Repeatedly in the years 1965 to 1967, he told both his federalist allies and his nationalist adversaries to be careful what they wished for: tinkering with the Constitution could open up a can of worms. (How right he was.) Only in late 1967 did he finally relent and agree to spearhead constitutional reform on Prime Minister Pearson’s behalf.
But there was more to his popular appeal than “Trudeau’s charter,” as the idea came to be known. In the spring of 1968, he put in motion a national policy—a fully developed set of ideas about Canada and the world that Canadians (including Quebecers) liked well enough to vote for in four elections out of five between 1968 and 1980, and that would come to define Canadian citizenship in the second century of Confederation. Some of its component parts were already visible when Trudeau was Pearson’s justice minister. These included the separation of church and state, the easing of divorce, the decriminalization of homosexuality and abortion, and the eviction of the state from the bedrooms of the nation. The rest came into view over the course of the 1968 campaign: rejection of nationalism in all of its forms, including Quebec nationalism and economic nationalism in English Canada; the entrenching of individual rights, including language rights, in a charter binding not only citizens but governments; the establishment of a culture of bilingualism across Canada paired with the rejection of biculturalism (deux nations); the beginnings of official multiculturalism; a Canada-first foreign and defence policy; and a frugal approach to government finance that included balancing the budget, stimulating regional development, and implementing equitable social policies without turning the government into Santa Claus.
There was nothing superficial about this process. The first constituency to back Trudeau was not the teenybopper crowd. It was the English-Canadian intellectual set, foremost among them historians of Canada—teachers and scholars who presumably knew something about their country and perceived that Trudeau did, too. Some, like professors John Saywell of York University and Pauline Jewett of Carleton, were Liberal partisans. Others, including the University of Toronto’s Ramsay Cook, were NDP stalwarts who in 1968 embraced Trudeau’s vision for Canada and abandoned their own parties. Peter C. Newman, Pierre Berton, and Robert Fulford were early supporters of Trudeau. And from the moment Trudeau appeared on the national scene, he inspired students everywhere. Bob Rae, Michael Ignatieff, and Stephen Clarkson were among the many undergraduates who rode the Trudeau wave in 1968. Some of them are riding it still.
It would take Trudeau and his Liberal confreres a decade and a half after 1968 to bring this vision fully into being, legally and especially constitutionally. They would encounter no small degree of hostility from some highly vocal Canadian constituencies along the way, most notably in Quebec and in the West, and they would take their fair share of missteps. But when it was over, when Trudeau retired from active politics in 1984, he had bequeathed to Canadians a new idea of themselves, one based on Charter values. These values, more than any other national attribute—more than peacekeeping, more than health care, more than even hockey—became the proud hallmark of Canadian citizenship.
This is how it all started.
CHAPTER ONE
THE STUBBORN ECCENTRIC
The city of Montreal was Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s lifelong home and the inspiration for nearly everything he accomplished over the course of his extraordinary life. With the exception of the two years he worked for the Privy Council Office, the nineteen he spent in federal politics, and another handful he spent travelling or studying abroad, he was an abiding fixture in the city of his birth. To a degree that is difficult to imagine today, when Canadians are always on the move and communities are ever changing, Trudeau was thoroughly, almost organically, integrated into the fabric and the rhythms of twentieth-century Montreal. He knew its streets, its social hierarchies, its traditions, its strictures. He spoke both its major languages and practised its predominant faith. He attended and later taught at some of its finest schools. He loved its history and its geography, its poets, its artists, and, of course, its women. Montreal cradled Pierre Trudeau as a child and again as an old man. He raised his boys there. He died there. And like generations of his forebears, he was laid to rest there.
What Trudeau knew above all—both of Montreal and of the province beyond it—was their politics.
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nbsp; Many aspects of Quebec’s political culture at mid-century are enduringly fascinating. But the key to understanding Trudeau’s unique place within it is the remarkable insularity of that culture. In the 1960s, the French-Canadian clerical, political, academic, and cultural elites were small, isolated (both by language and geography), and thoroughly intertwined. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Moreover, Quebecers seemed to know everything about everyone else—people’s family histories, where they had studied and with whom, where they had attended Mass, which organizations they had joined, which books and journals they had read, whose ideas and influences they had imbibed. Open almost any issue of Le Devoir in the Trudeaumania period, and you will discover an unmistakable subtext, a sense that the leading lights in Quebec society—even those who called themselves adversaries—were part of the same big extended family. They knew which names to drop. They knew how to ingratiate themselves with each other. They certainly knew how to push each other’s buttons.
This insularity helps to explain the virtually linear trajectory of Pierre Trudeau’s thinking about Quebec—from doctrinaire nationalist to uncompromising anti-nationalist. But more interestingly, and far more subtly, it helps to account for the decidedly non-linear and sometimes puzzling milieu in which those ideas took shape. To cite what is perhaps the best example of this insular world, Trudeau penned his most scathing critique of his nationalist adversaries, “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” (“The New Treason of the Intellectuals”), in the fall of 1961. One of the most ostensibly treacherous of those intellectuals was René Lévesque, then a provincial Liberal cabinet minister. Yet over the next two winters, Trudeau and Lévesque met fortnightly in Gérard Pelletier’s living room as part of a small group of progressives dedicated to charting Quebec’s future. (The other members were journalist André Laurendeau and labour leader Jean Marchand, both of whom were also nationalists.) In other words, the famously intense public debate between Lévesque and Trudeau that culminated in the 1980 referendum on sovereignty was but one layer of a long-running, even fraternal conversation between the two men.1 The same familiarity was evident in Trudeau’s relationship with premiers Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson, with prominent academics like Léon Dion, and with influential editorialists including Pierre Laporte and Claude Ryan.
It was this culture of familiarity that made Trudeau the black sheep among Quebec’s Quiet Revolutionaries and, ultimately, the nemesis of the separatists. But never did it make him, as his critics have claimed, un inconnu très connu (a famous outsider).
As political scientists Max and Monique Nemni have demonstrated so powerfully, Quebec’s hothouse political culture in the 1930s and the early 1940s was the crucible of Trudeau’s maturation as a thinker.2
If, in June 1968, Trudeau understood the separatist enthusiasms of Pierre Bourgault and his ilk, it is because the young Trudeau had himself embraced radical separatism and carried its slogans defiantly into the streets. In 1937, at the age of seventeen, he gave a speech to his Brébeuf classmates. “To maintain our French mentality,” he asserted, “what we must do is to preserve our language and to shun American civilization.”3 In November 1942, in the midst of World War II, Trudeau gave an even more conventionally nationalist speech in support of Jean Drapeau, then a young law student contesting a federal seat in the riding of Outremont. Both Drapeau and Trudeau believed that Prime Minister Mackenzie King had defiled democracy by backtracking on his promise not to conscript Canadians in the war against Hitler. “If we are not in a democracy,” Trudeau raged, “let the revolution begin without delay!”4As Trudeau would later admit, his youthful beliefs were almost entirely the product of his political isolation. Once he was outside the Quebec fishbowl, he abandoned them wholesale.
In 1944, just two years after his fiery anti-conscription speech, he set off for Harvard University to study political economy. There, at the age of twenty-five, Trudeau became, as he put it himself, a “citizen of the world.” He read foreign newspapers for the first time, mingled with American GIs who had served in Europe, and discussed world issues from an international perspective. Until then, the fight against European fascism had been little more than an abstract concept for him. (Never would Trudeau’s English-Canadian detractors let him forget the patent callousness of his horsing around in Prussian military regalia during the darkest days of the conflict.) The “historic importance” of World War II came as an epiphany to Trudeau. It changed everything, including his understanding of Quebec politics. “I realized that the Quebec of the time was away from the action, that it was living outside modern times,” he would later write. “Quebec had stayed provincial in every sense of the word, that is to say marginal, isolated, out of step with the evolution of the world.”5
Trudeau’s classroom training at Harvard, meanwhile, cemented his belief in the sacred importance of the individual. Under the influence of exiled European professors like the German Heinrich Brüning, he came to reject all collectivist thinking as fundamentally tyrannical. The first thing to go was the theory of corporatism. This was a reactionary ideology popular in Catholic Quebec (and Catholic Europe) that envisaged a hierarchical conception of social organization based on the family.6 Like practically all young French Canadians of his generation, Trudeau had been a devotee of corporatism. No longer. “French-Canadian thinkers, politicians, journalists, and editors advocated corporatism as a kind of extraordinary panacea,” Trudeau would later say of his own formative years. “No one was far-sighted or courageous enough to say that it was all nonsense.”7 Although the adult Trudeau would occasionally write as a democratic socialist, after Harvard his deepest political convictions would remain resolutely those of a near-classic liberal. “The view that every human must be free to shape his own destiny,” he said, “became for me a certainty.”8
Harvard (and the smattering of graduate courses Trudeau subsequently took at the École des sciences politiques in Paris and the London School of Economics) also confirmed his status as a self-styled “contrarian.” He was always happiest “paddling against the current,” he liked to say. In the context of mid-century Quebec, this stance meant challenging nationalist thinking in whatever form happened to be au courant. By definition, nationalism privileges one collectivity vis-à-vis others. It protects the in-group from the outsiders. Seen from the perspective of liberal individualism, nationalism is fundamentally unjust—irrespective of whether it is bundled with high-minded appeals to “imagined communities” or any other such fiction.9 “A nationalistic government is by nature intolerant, discriminatory, and, when all is said and done, totalitarian,” Trudeau would aver throughout his political career. “A truly democratic government cannot be ‘nationalist,’ because it must pursue the good of all its citizens, without prejudice to ethnic origin.”10
Not surprisingly, Trudeau also cast off the popular nationalist version of Quebec history promulgated by the Université de Montréal historian Michel Brunet. Just as Trudeau was renouncing corporatism, Professor Brunet, just two years Trudeau’s senior, was reimagining it as a defining moment in Quebec’s national rebirth. “Many French Canadians began to ask themselves if it would not be more realistic to promote the economic and cultural progress of their community inside the borders of Quebec,” Brunet would write of the 1930s, “instead of waging exhausting and fruitless fights to establish bilingualism throughout Canada.”11 The question was, of course, rhetorical. Well into the sixties, Brunet and other members of the so-called Montreal School would urge Quebecers to use the tools of modern democracy to reclaim Quebec as their “fatherland.”12 After the horrors of the Nazi period, the suggestion that Quebec should be the fatherland of the French Canadians repelled Trudeau. So, too, did Brunet’s willingness to scapegoat English Canada for Quebec’s economic underdevelopment. Blaming “les Anglais” for Quebec’s problems was “ridiculous,” Trudeau would say flatly.13
In 1948, Trudeau embarked on a year-long spiritual quest that took him to Asia via Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He int
ended the trip not as an intellectual exercise but as an immersion in the language, dress, and labour of local people. “This trip was basically a challenge I set myself,” he later wrote, “as I had done with sports, with canoeing expeditions, and with intellectual explorations. I wanted to know, for instance, whether I could survive in a Chinese province without knowing a word of Chinese, or would be able to travel across a war-torn country without ever succumbing to panic.”14 He got his wish, experiencing jail in Jerusalem and Belgrade, an attack by the Viet Cong when he was on his way to Saigon, myriad death threats, and deportation from at least one Communist-bloc country. “It was incredible,” he later wrote. “Everywhere I went seemed to be at war.”15 Israel, Pakistan, Indochina, China, Iraq—anywhere Trudeau found himself on the front lines, he was only too happy to rely on “the courage and kindness of ordinary people.”16 Such experiences made him more worldly and less intolerant, shaping the two precepts that would later govern his conduct even with his nominal Cold War enemies: that people of differing views could agree to disagree, and that one must always seek out the humanity of one’s enemies.17