Trudeau was fed up. His opposition to Quebec nationalism hardened. Polite debate gave way to hard-edged critique. He attacked his opponents with the polemic “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” (“The New Treason of the Intellectuals”), published in Cité libre in April 1962. Sympathetic Trudeau biographers have treated this essay as his Ninth Symphony, his critics as his most “murderous” tirade.39 Both appraisals are correct. “It is not the concept of nation that is retrograde,” Trudeau famously began. “It is the idea that the nation must necessarily be sovereign.”
Trudeau’s first target in “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” was RIN leader Marcel Chaput, who, in Pourquoi je suis séparatiste, had likened the plight of French Canada to that of the thirty or so former colonies in Africa and elsewhere that had declared themselves sovereign. “It is the turn of the French-Canadian people to arise and claim their rightful place among free nations,” Chaput had written.40 Nonsense, said Trudeau. “Putting the independence of Quebec into this historical context is pure sophistry.” India was a sovereign republic of eight principal religions and even more languages. Ceylon consisted of three ethnic groups and four religions. “In Africa the polyethnic nature of the new states is even more striking,” Trudeau insisted. “As for Algeria, which our Indépendantistes are always holding up as an example, there is no doubt what kind of state she is seeking to become. Besides inhabitants of French, Spanish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, and Levantine origin, in this particular country we must count Berbers, Kabyles, Arabs, Moors, Negroes, Tuaregs, Mazabites, and a number of Cheshire cats.” The worst of the separatists’ “cock-and-bull” analogies was that of Cuba, a country Trudeau had visited and knew well. Cuba was “sovereign under Batista and is sovereign under Castro,” he railed. “Democratic self-government was non-existent there yesterday and is still non-existent there today. So what does that prove?”41
The nation is not a “biological reality,” Trudeau continued, nor any hallowed feat of historical progress. “The tiny portion of history marked by the emergence of the nation-states is also the scene of the most devastating wars, the worst atrocities, and the most degrading collective hatred the world has ever seen,” he affirmed. French-Canadian nationalism was nothing but an overreaction to Anglo-Canadian nationalism, which, despite its longevity, “never had much of an edge.” “Constitutionalist” visionaries from French Canada had always understood this. “The multi-national state was dreamed about by Lafontaine, realized under Cartier, perfected by Laurier, and humanized with Bourassa,” wrote Trudeau. “If Canada as a state has had so little room for French Canadians it is above all because we have failed to make ourselves indispensable to its future.”42
Trudeau concluded “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” with a bold challenge to the new generation of Quebec nationalists.
We have expended a great deal of time and energy proclaiming the rights due our nationality, invoking our divine mission, trumpeting our virtues, bewailing our misfortunes, denouncing our enemies, and avowing our independence; and for all that not one of our workmen is the more skilled, nor a civil servant the more efficient, a financier the richer, a doctor the more advanced, a bishop the more learned, nor a single solitary politician the less ignorant. Now, except for a few stubborn eccentrics, there is probably not one French-Canadian intellectual who has not spent at least four hours a week over the last year discussing separatism. That makes how many thousand times two hundred hours spent just flapping our arms? And can any one of them honestly say he has heard a single argument not already expounded ad nauseam twenty, forty, and even sixty years ago?
The Separatists of 1962 that I have met really are, in general, genuinely earnest and nice people; but the few times I have had the opportunity of talking with them at any length, I have almost always been astounded by the totalitarian outlook of some, the anti-Semitism of others and the complete ignorance of basic economics of all of them.
This is what I call la nouvelle trahison des clercs: this self-deluding passion of a large segment of our thinking population for throwing themselves headlong—intellectually and spiritually—into purely escapist pursuits.43
Undoubtedly, Trudeau had himself in mind when he referenced “stubborn eccentrics” in “La nouvelle trahison des clercs.” But there were others. Most of his old comrades from Cité libre saw Quebec politics as he did. Many of the smart young intellectuals connected with Montreal’s Centre des Recherches Sociales (CRS) were also liberal and federalist, including Albert Breton, Raymond Breton, Maurice Pinard, and Marc Lalonde, the thirty-three-year-old Montreal lawyer whose political fortunes would thereafter be umbilically tied to Trudeau’s.
In early 1964—by which time Pierre Bourgault had taken his place as a leading sovereignist provocateur and the FLQ was one year into its inaugural campaign of separatist mayhem—Trudeau, Lalonde, and five other CRS members issued a short tract entitled “An Appeal for Reason in Canadian Politics.” The document was published simultaneously in Cité libre and the English-language Canadian Forum, attracting the notice of editorialists across Canada, all of whom correctly identified it as an “anti-separatism blueprint.”44 Both the text and the voice of the manifesto were pure, undiluted Trudeau. “Canada today is a country in search of a purpose,” the document announced. The impotence of the central government in the face of rising regionalism risked “the utter disintegration of the federal state.” Quebec separatism was a “waste of time,” as was the misguided economic nationalism rising in English Canada. “We must be more precise in our analysis of situations, more intellectually honest in debate and more realistic in decision,” the tract concluded. “We must descend from the euphoria of all-embracing ideologies and come to grips with actual problems. If this country is to work, federalism must be preserved and refined at all cost.”45
Trudeau knew which way the wind was blowing in Quebec, of course. By the time he and the other stubborn eccentrics were appealing for reason in Canadian politics, virtually all Quebec elites—the politicians, the artists and writers, the editorialists, and the intellectuals—were espousing a new constitutional deal for Quebec, one that acknowledged the existence in Canada of deux nations. René Lévesque gave popular voice to the idea. “All our action, in the immediate future, must take two fundamental facts into account,” Lévesque told Le Devoir editor Jean-Marc Léger in 1963. “The first is that French Canada is a true nation. The second is that politically we are not a sovereign people.” Obviously, Lévesque’s private debates with Trudeau had sharpened his nationalist vision. “We must have a Canada which, to begin with, takes into account the existence of two nations and the specific position, the particular needs, of Quebec. It is infinitely more important to make Quebec progressive, free, and strong, than to devote the best of our energies to propagating the doubtful advantages of biculturalism.”46
In the Quebec legislature, the consensus on deux nations was bipartisan and unassailable. Premier Jean Lesage envisaged amendments to the Canadian Constitution guaranteeing statut particulier (special status) for Quebec. The leader of the Opposition, Daniel Johnson, believed that an entirely new deal for Quebec was necessary. “The constitution should be conceived so that Canada is not only a federation of ten provinces but a federation in which two nations are equal in law and in fact,” Johnson wrote in his book Égalité ou indépendance.47 As premier, Johnson would carry this thinly veiled ultimatum—equality or independence—to Ottawa and lay it directly at the feet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson.
In public, Trudeau continued to state as bluntly as ever his aversion to the deux nations conception of Canada. Party leaders who demand special status, he quipped, “cannot admit that they are separatists. We have lost the habit of asking our politicians what they think.”48 But behind closed doors, Trudeau continued his work as a legal scholar to promote Canadian federalism, painstakingly and dispassionately, for the benefit of Quebecers. Over the winter of 1965, he composed a long essay on “Quebec and the Constitutional Problem.” The piece was co
mmissioned as a brief for several Quebec groups appearing before the Constitution Committee of the Quebec legislature, which had been struck in May 1963 to study Quebec’s constitutional options. Trudeau’s essay was widely circulated among Quebec’s political elite and came to be seen as the defining statement of his doctrine of federalism before he joined the federal Liberals.
“I recognize the right of nations to self-determination,” wrote Trudeau.
But to claim this right without taking into account the price that will have to be paid, and without clearly demonstrating that it is to the advantage of the whole nation, is nothing short of a reckless gamble. Men do not exist for states: states are created to make it easier for men to attain some of their common objectives.
In my opinion, the “two nation” concept is dangerous in theory and groundless in fact. It would be disastrous if—at the very moment when French Canadians are at last awakening to the modern world and making their presence count in the country—their politicians were to be won over to anti-federalist policies. On the other hand, if Quebec were part of a Canadian federation grouping two linguistic communities as I am advocating, French Canadians would be supported by a country of more than eighteen million inhabitants, with the second or third highest standard of living in the world, and with a degree of industrial maturity that promises to give it the most brilliant of futures.
Consequently, there is no need to evoke the notion of a national state to turn Quebec into a province “different from the others.” In a great number of vital areas, and notably those that concern the development of particular cultural values, Quebec has full and complete sovereignty under the Canadian constitution.49
Such eloquence was all for naught. By 1965, no one in Quebec appeared to be listening to federalist voices like Trudeau’s, and, what was worse, no one in Ottawa seemed to know how to respond to the deux nations idea of Confederation that was now de rigueur in Quebec. Just months after Trudeau submitted his brief to the Quebec legislature, he and other like-minded Quebec federalists led by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier pulled up stakes in Montreal and joined the Pearson Liberals in Ottawa. They loved Quebec as much as ever, but the country they wanted to save was Canada. As Trudeau told CBC correspondent Norman DePoe, “Our main objective was to join what we thought to be the only party which could find, now, a solution to the problems of Canada breaking up or not breaking up.”50
Pierre Trudeau spent the period 1950 to 1965 not merely formulating his ideas about Canadian federalism but testing and retesting them—in Cité libre, in academic journals, at conferences, in seminars and think tanks, and especially in endless private conversations with other Quebecers. For the last four years of this period, he laboured as a professor of constitutional law. He listened carefully to the arguments of his allies and his opponents, continued to read voraciously in the field, and endeavoured whenever possible to invoke reason against passion.
Almost nothing of what Trudeau said or wrote in the years before he went to Ottawa, even including “La nouvelle trahison des clercs,” suggests that he was harbouring ulterior motives. “People have often asked me whether, in the 1950s, I already had political ambitions,” Trudeau later reflected. “I have always answered in the negative, which was the truth. Leaving Quebec was out of the question, as far as I was concerned; it was here that I wanted to be active.”51 On the contrary, had anyone else laid out a federalist program that Trudeau believed would be good for French Canadians, there is every reason to imagine that he would have supported it. But no one did. “After two years in Parliament,” Gérard Pelletier observed in January 1968, “I have met very few people, English or French speaking, Liberal, Conservative or NDP, who possess as clear a view of the kind of country they want to build and the brand of federalism they wish to promote. Trudeau’s views are certainly not popular with either the separatists or the outright centralizers. However, they are seldom challenged with serious arguments.”52
Trudeau’s critics would say, then and later, that he was out of step with Quebec’s elites. But what they really meant was that he had failed to understand what was at stake in Quebec. This presumed failure is what put the sting in the accusation that Trudeau was “un inconnu très connu.” At best, he was a prisoner of his own ideological rigidity, his opponents stated. At worst, he was a vendu who would sell out the birthright of his own people.
Most of the time, Trudeau could not be bothered to answer such charges. But once in a while, he did. In March 1968, for example, when he was campaigning for the Liberal leadership, Trudeau gave a speech to the Liberal Reform Club in Quebec City. Some separatist students showed up to heckle him, and in true professorial style, Trudeau engaged them directly and without condescension. “Don’t you feel a bit isolated in Canadian politics due to the fact that all Quebec parties and all Canadian parties have accepted the concept of two nations?” asked one student. “I don’t feel isolated at all,” Trudeau replied. “The fact that I’m the only person who thinks something isn’t enough to make me think I’m wrong. When I believe something, I explain it and if I can’t convince people, I say well okay maybe they’re wrong and maybe they’re right. I’ll have another look at it.”53
Trudeau knew Quebec politics root and branch. He knew the difference between Quebec nationalists like Jean Lesage and outright separatists like Pierre Bourgault. He knew that the violence of the FLQ was repulsive to most of the francophone Quebecers in whose name it was perpetrated. He also knew—as did everyone else—that support for outright separatism among Quebec voters was never more than a paltry 13 per cent, even in the headiest period of the Quiet Revolution.54
But Trudeau also had two key insights about the nationalist ferment exploding around him. The first was that even though nationalists like René Lévesque, Jean Lesage, and Daniel Johnson claimed they did not want to destroy Canada, they advocated constitutional reforms that would either tear the country apart or Balkanize it irrevocably. Well into the Trudeaumania period, Trudeau would ask his opponents to explain how a deux nations Canada would work and, in particular, whether it could win the support of Canadians outside Quebec. If there was a formula by which the other provinces would accept special status for Quebec in a strong and united Canada, Trudeau asked, what was it? The answers he got—from Quebec politicians, from his Liberal leadership rivals, and ultimately from his opponents in the 1968 election campaign—were uniformly vague and unconvincing.
Trudeau’s second insight can be stated even more concisely. He believed that the nationalist elites in Quebec did not speak for Quebecers—and not merely because he believed that their ideas “led directly to doctrinaire separatism.”
In contrast with many Quebec politicians who, like René Lévesque, patently loved Quebec but thought very little of the country beyond it, Trudeau genuinely believed that Canada belonged as much to Quebecers as to other Canadians.55 This is what he meant when, in the early 1960s, he fulminated against the “ghettoization” of French Canadians. Ironically, Trudeau was often accused of defending the constitutional status quo in Canada. Absolutely not, he replied. He was “fighting for the only thing that can make Canada united—to take the fuse out of explosive Quebec nationalism—by making sure that Quebec is not a ghetto for French Canadians, that all of Canada is theirs. It’s obvious that [I am] saying to French Canadians: No, not only the Quebec government can speak for you. On the contrary, only the Ottawa government can give the French Canadians their due across the country.”56
During the 1968 election campaign, Trudeau would be asked where “love of country” fit into his political thinking. “What you’re really asking me is whether I have a gut feeling for Canada or not,” Trudeau replied. “Obviously I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life and energies fighting for the kind of society I think is right. I wouldn’t have spent so much of my working life and my studying life learning about Canada and doing something about it if I weren’t at least concerned with patriotism or with Canadian identity as I w
ant to see it developed.”57
CHAPTER TWO
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
It would be an exaggeration to say that Pierre Trudeau was unknown to English Canadians when he arrived in Ottawa in 1965, but only a slight one. In bilingual university circles, Trudeau’s reputation as a citélibriste preceded him. His essay “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec” appeared in 1958 in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science and was reprinted two years later in an academic tome on “French-English relations.”1 But in general, Quebec politics in the Duplessis era did not interest Canadians elsewhere in the country, and they noticed nothing even remotely resembling a national-unity crisis until the Quiet Revolution was well under way.
Not until the early 1960s did “Pierre-Elliot” Trudeau—his name invariably misspelled—begin to attract notice in the English-Canadian media, and even then the attention was fleeting. His first mention in the Toronto Star—the mass-circulation daily that would later do so much to promote Trudeau’s vision of Canada—appeared in Robert Fulford’s review of Marcel Chaput’s Pourquoi je suis séparatiste in January 1962.2 Fulford positioned Trudeau as a “left-liberal” opponent of nationalist ideology in Quebec and surmised, wrongly, that he represented the predominant intellectual position on that question. Even so, Fulford’s early identification of Trudeau as “one of the civilized men of Canada” (as well as the writer’s characterization of René Lévesque as “the brightest of all the important politicians”) helped to set a high-minded tone across the country for the constitutional debate then brewing in Quebec.3
Trudeaumania Page 6