Canadians would come to know Trudeau as tough (“Just watch me”), irreverent (“Fuddle duddle”), and even crass (“Mangez de la merde”). He had a sharp mind, an even sharper pen, and a taste for the jugular when he was heckled or provoked. But once he had jettisoned his youthful fanaticism and embraced “reason over passion,” he was almost never hateful—not even to those who would make death threats against him.
As Justin Trudeau has said often, most poignantly in his October 2000 eulogy for his father, Pierre’s highest ideal in political debate was to critique his opponents’ ideas without demeaning them personally—an ideal he would occasionally honour in the breach.18 Yet well before he entered politics, tolerance and a genuine interest in people’s differences were defining features of Trudeau’s personal philosophy. He never wavered from this attitude or apologized for it. What is more, he seldom even bothered to explain it. As justice minister and as a Liberal leadership hopeful, for example, Trudeau would be accused of carrying “the stench of Sodom” into federal politics for having liberalized Canadian law on homosexuality, abortion, and divorce. Yet never did he strike back at his critics in kind, with ad hominem slurs. And never, even when the political dividends might have been considerable, did he attack any of the usual suspects—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, homosexuals, Americans, Cubans, Russians. He thus left himself wide open both to innuendo (that he was gay, or soft on crime, or irreligious) and to outright smears (that he was a Red or a fascist). And when his enemies manoeuvred to take full advantage, he gave every appearance that he could not have cared less.
As he observed at the height of Trudeaumania, such “garbage” was beneath Canadians. He had better things to worry about.
His world travels and his studies at an end, Trudeau returned to Montreal in the spring of 1949. He arrived just in time to witness the dramatic (and illegal) strike of five thousand miners at the town of Asbestos, Quebec. Trudeau drove out to the Eastern Townships with Gérard Pelletier, who was covering the strike for Le Devoir. Expecting to hang around for a day or two, Trudeau was instead drawn into the struggle on the strikers’ behalf. He attended meetings, made speeches, and, alongside Pelletier, ended up in police custody. At Asbestos, he later wrote, “I found a Quebec I did not really know, that of workers exploited by management, denounced by government, clubbed by police, and yet burning with fervent militancy.”19 In his seminal 1956 book La grève de l’amiante, Trudeau would describe the strike as a turning point in the history of Quebec. It exposed Quebec nationalism as an ideology of “discouraging impotence,” he observed, and moved Quebecers to confront their antiquated social and political institutions, however tentatively.20
Towards the end of that same summer, 1949, Trudeau surprised all of his friends and took a job in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa. He wanted to see how the political theories he had studied so closely applied to the day-to-day workings of Canadian federalism. His stay in Ottawa turned out to be little more than a sojourn—evidence, said his detractors, that he could not stick to anything. Less than two years into the Privy Council job, Trudeau resigned. His biographer, John English, has suggested recently that he did so because he disapproved of the Liberal government’s decision to participate in the Korean War.21 Trudeau himself recalled only that he wanted to get back to Montreal. “In Ottawa, everything is going pretty smoothly,” he explained to his boss, Gordon Robertson, clerk of the Privy Council. “Right now Quebec is where the important battles are being fought. That’s where I can be most useful, even if my influence is only marginal.”22 Although he coveted a university teaching job in those years, Trudeau declined an invitation to join the faculty of law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He wanted to stay where the action was.
In the summer of 1950, while Trudeau was still living in Ottawa, he and Gérard Pelletier founded the French-language journal Cité libre. The new publication intended not only to advocate for liberal reforms in Quebec but also to provide a rigorous, peer-reviewed forum in which to formulate and fine-tune those reforms. Despite its latter-day fame as a hub of anti-Duplessis activism, Cité libre was no broadsheet. Its articles were often long and pedantic. Its circulation never exceeded five hundred copies in the 1950s and frequently fell well short of that number. What mattered to the citélibristes was not market share but the reach of their ideas among Quebec’s francophone elites. Anyone who was anyone in Quebec politics read Cité libre or at least knew its contents, even Duplessis. And despite the premier’s efforts to control the Quebec press, the citélibristes’ ideas also trickled out to the reading public via op-eds in Montreal’s leading dailies.
At every stage, Trudeau was the moving force behind Cité libre. He underwrote it, edited it, and gave voice to its core liberal-humanist precepts. “He had such a natural superiority over all of us in the international field,” Pelletier later recalled. “We also discovered how far he had gone in evolving political ideas for French Canada—and for the rest of Canada.”23 Trudeau himself was brash about what the journal might accomplish. “We want to bear witness to the Christian and French fact in America,” he wrote in the first issue. “But we must also throw everything else overboard. The time has arrived for us to borrow from architecture the discipline called ‘functional,’ to cast aside the thousands of past prejudices which encumber the present, and to build for the new man. Overthrow all totems, transgress all taboos. Better still, consider them as dead ends. Without passion, let us be intelligent.”24 A full decade and a half before Trudeau first appeared on English Canadians’ radar, Cité libre would establish his standing in Quebec as a bold and brilliant iconoclast. In the Trudeaumania period, when English Canadians were scrambling to figure out what made him tick, his ideas were as familiar to Quebecers as maple syrup.
Much could be said about the long, dark decade of the 1950s, when citélibristes and other Quebec progressives opposed Premier Maurice Duplessis’s autocratic rule. (The premier’s personal interventions to deny Trudeau a teaching job at the Université de Montréal are particularly noteworthy.) Whether Duplessis was the black-hearted villain his critics made him out to be remains the subject of considerable debate. But the salient point for understanding Trudeau’s standing in Quebec politics was the relative unity of the opposition that Duplessis inspired. This was not merely a tactical alliance but a united front—one that persisted beyond the death of le chef in 1959 and gave the Quiet Revolution its air of fervent optimism. “The style adopted as the 1960s dawned was one of daring,” Gretta Chambers, former chancellor of McGill University, has recalled recently. “Nothing was sacred, including continuity. Particularly for the young the self-assertion that grew out of this movement to break out of the existing social, political, and cultural constraints was both heady and contagious.”25
Quebec reformers welcomed the 1960 electoral victory of the Lesage Liberals as the dawn of a new day. “For all of us who had fought for ten years for the modernization of Quebec,” Trudeau later recalled, “it was no small satisfaction to be governed at last by a young, competent, dynamic team urgently determined to move the clock forward and put Quebec onto the same time as the rest of the Western world.”26 With almost dizzying speed, the agrarian, Catholic, and patronage-ridden Quebec of the Duplessis era was torn down and replaced by a modern secular state. Health, welfare, and education were declericalized, replaced by vast new provincial bureaucracies of professionally trained specialists. In the five years after Duplessis’s death, the provincial budget quadrupled, from roughly $500 million to $2 billion.27 Rattrapage—catching up to “the rest of the Western world” in social and especially economic development—became the new watchword in Quebec politics.28
In 1961, Trudeau was finally appointed associate professor of law at the Université de Montréal, his dream job. His future seemed secure, even happy. Duplessis was gone, Lesage was in power, and Quebec was at long last taking its place in the modern world. All that remained, it seemed, was for Professor Trudeau to decommission Cité libre and dedi
cate whatever remained of his working life to moulding the minds of his bright young students.
It did not happen this way, of course. “Why did this happiness have to be so short-lived?” Trudeau lamented. “All this movement had barely started when people began hurrying to revive the old slogans.”29
Predictably, perhaps, the centre could not hold. As the modernization of Quebec gained momentum, the consensus that had fuelled the Quiet Revolution exploded into a kaleidoscope of competing visions. Nationalist and separatist groups emerged, of which L’Action Socialiste, L’Alliance Laurentienne, and Pierre Bourgault’s RIN were merely the avant-garde. Dr. Marcel Chaput’s influential Pourquoi je suis séparatiste (Why I Am a Separatist) was published in 1961, making waves across Quebec and beyond.30 Trudeau’s students—and indeed some of his colleagues—were increasingly sovereignist and contemptuous of the raw deal they believed French Canadians had been dealt within Confederation. They mocked Cité libre as the boneyard of federalist squares who could not see that the future of Quebec lay in full-blown political autonomy. The appetites of the new generation of nationalists became insatiable. Quebecers must become maîtres chez nous, they demanded. The separatists, always a small but noisy minority, took this idea to its logical end point. Once Quebecers had acquired the constitutional and financial powers necessary to fulfill their national destiny, the separatists asked, what practical use could they possibly have for Ottawa, or even Canada?
Pierre Trudeau spent much of 1961—without question the decisive year in his evolution as a political thinker—formulating a programmatic response to this question. Programmatic is the key word, for as much as Trudeau liked to imagine himself as a contrarian, he was never above acknowledging the legitimacy of certain elements in his adversaries’ critique of Canadian federalism. The question for Trudeau was not whether French Canadians had suffered injustices in the past. They had. Writing in Cité libre, Trudeau offered a sharp defence of Quebecers’ historic instinct for self-preservation. “We must accept the facts of history as they are,” he wrote.
However outworn and absurd it may be, it was the Nation-State image which spurred the political thinking of the British, and subsequently of Canadians of British descent in the “Dominion of Canada.” Broadly speaking, this meant identifying Canada, the State, with themselves to the greatest possible degree.
Since the French Canadians had the bad grace to decline assimilation, such an identification was beyond being completely realizable. So the Anglo-Canadians built themselves an illusion of it by fencing off the French Canadians in their Quebec ghetto and then nibbling at its constitutional powers and carrying them off bit by bit to Ottawa. Outside Quebec they fought, with staggering ferocity, against anything which might intrude upon that illusion: the use of French on stamps, money, cheques, in the civil service, the railroads, and the whole works. In the face of such aggressive nationalism, what choice lay before the French Canadians over, say, the last century?31
Seen in retrospect, this statement is one of the most incisive in the entire Trudeau oeuvre. It gives the lie to the accusation made against him, especially in the Trudeaumania period, that he somehow sought to ingratiate himself with English Canadians by “putting Quebec in its place.”
No, the pressing issue for Trudeau was how Quebecers could best move forward. “Without backsliding to the ridiculous and reactionary idea of national sovereignty, how can we protect our French-Canadian national qualities?” he asked. The answer was obvious. “We must separate once and for all the concepts of State and of Nation, and make Canada a truly pluralistic and polyethnic society.” Let the past be the past, Trudeau told Quebecers. “Whether or not the Conquest was the origin of all evils and whether or not the English have been the most perfidious occupiers in the memory of man, it remains none the less true that the French-Canadian community holds in its hands, hic et nunc [here and now], the essential instruments for its regeneration; by the Constitution of Canada the state of Quebec can exercise the most extensive powers over the souls of French Canadians and over the territory where they live—the most rich and most vast of all the Canadian provinces.”32
Trudeau was at his most persuasive, arguably, in the area of his own juridical expertise, namely the division of constitutional powers afforded by the British North America Act. Let the feds continue to manage foreign affairs, trade, navigation, postal services, money, and banking, he insisted. But let the provinces fully exploit the provisions of the same Constitution to protect and advance their “ethnic peculiarities”—education, municipal affairs, the administration of justice, marriage, and property and civil rights. “French Canadians have all the powers they need to make Quebec a political society affording due respect for nationalist aspirations and at the same time giving unprecedented scope for human potential in the broadest sense,” asserted Trudeau.33 In comparison, talk of a separate Quebec state was not merely self-indulgent but “preposterous,” he believed. “We are not well enough educated nor rich enough, nor, above all, are there enough of us to man and finance a government possessing all the necessary means for both war and peace. The fixed per-capita cost would ruin us.” As he would for the rest of the 1960s, Trudeau demanded that Quebecers avert their inward gaze and embrace the wider world. “Ouvrons les frontières,” he said famously. “Ce peuple meurt d’asphyxie!”34 (“Open the frontiers. This people is dying of asphyxiation!”)
If there was a term that encapsulated Trudeau’s theory of federalism, then and later, it was functional. He entitled his first Cité libre essay “Politique fonctionnelle” in 1950 and referenced the idea well into his tenure as prime minister. To describe his approach to governing, Trudeau frequently used the English term pragmatic, which was entirely apt. But it was an imperfect synonym, for the French word fonctionnelle carried a double meaning. On the one hand, a functional politics was a practical politics. It demanded the application of reason and problem-solving techniques to policy. On the other hand, the term carried an ideological meaning, which had implications not only for politics but also for power. A functional politics, as Trudeau construed it, would rationally assign powers within Canada’s federalist structure to whichever level of government they best suited. In other words, there would be no redistribution of powers based on vague and ultimately emotional claims about “nations.” In this way, politique fonctionnelle worked directly against Quebec nationalism. It was a cipher, fully understood by Trudeau’s Québécois friends and foes alike. It meant no special status for Quebec.
The good news was that Quebecers had no need for special status. In 1961, Pierre Trudeau laid down this remarkable scenario for the future of Quebec and Canada—remarkable because it so closely resembled the Canada over which he presided as prime minister:
If Quebec became a shining example, if to live there were to partake of freedom and progress, if culture enjoyed a place of honour there, if the universities commanded respect and renown from afar, if the administration of public affairs were the best in the land—and none of this presupposes any declaration of independence!—French Canadians would no longer need to do battle for bilingualism; the ability to speak French would become a status symbol, even an open-sesame in business and public life. Even in Ottawa, superior competence on the part of our politicians and civil servants would bring spectacular changes.
Such an undertaking is immensely difficult, but possible; it takes more guts than jaw. And therein, it would seem to me, is an “ideal” not a whit less “inspiring” than that other one [separatism] that’s been in vogue for a couple of years in our little part of the world.35
Trudeau could still break bread with René Lévesque when he wrote those extraordinary lines. Only in 1962 did Trudeau begin to distance himself from nationalists like Lévesque, and only because their runaway political successes now appeared to him to pose an existential threat to Canada.
The Lesage Liberals, just two years into their first majority mandate, called a snap election for November 1962. They adopted the sl
ogan maîtres chez nous and ran a one-issue campaign on their plan to nationalize all of the privately owned hydroelectric interests operating in the province. It was Lévesque himself, then serving as Lesage’s popular minister of natural resources, who laid the groundwork for nationalization, soothing North American capitalists with assurances that he was no Fidel Castro. Hydro-Québec thus emerged as one of the most potent symbols of the Quiet Revolution, one on which Lévesque and Lesage were prepared to stake their political careers. Their instincts proved impeccable. When the ballots were counted, the Liberals swept the province, taking 56.4 per cent of the popular vote and sixty-three seats out of ninety-five—a dozen more than they had won in 1960. They wasted no time implementing their nationalization promise. In December 1962, the government of Quebec bought out all of the remaining private hydro interests with a massive provincial bond issue.
Pierre Trudeau had little enthusiasm for Lévesque’s Hydro-Québec deal, but his main objection to this neo-nationalist triumph remained one of principle. Like any good liberal, Trudeau adhered strongly to the principle of checks and balances, or what he himself called “counterweights.” Democratic states worked best, he believed, when power was balanced among various levels of government.36 Even before the Liberal landslide, Trudeau perceived that the new nationalism in Quebec had achieved critical mass. It now threatened to overwhelm Canadian federalism. “By 1962,” he later recalled, “the Lesage government and public opinion in Quebec had magnified provincial autonomy into an absolute, and were attempting to reduce federal power to nothing.”37 Worse, Liberal sloganeering had reified the most retrograde elements of the old Quebec nationalism. “Instead of remaining committed to politics based on realism and common sense, we were plunged into the ‘politics of grandeur’ whose main preoccupation all too often was rolling out red carpets,” Trudeau later fumed. “A province is not a nation but a mix of diverse people, differentiated by religion, culture, and mother tongue. Was it necessary to grind down all these differences and impose a dominating and intolerant ideology on all minorities? I found this change of direction aberrant. I knew that it led directly to doctrinaire separatism.”38
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