Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  The same effect was achieved during Trudeau’s first appearance on CBC’s English-language television network. It came in the winter of 1963, when Trudeau joined moderator Gérard Pelletier, historians Peter Waite and Michel Brunet, McGill law professor Frank Scott, Hautes Études Commerciales professor Jacques Parizeau, and a number of other intellectuals to discuss the future of Confederation.4 The four-evening series took the form of dour (but bilingual) scholarly exchanges, complete with the presentation of position papers and simultaneous translation. It was just the sort of high-brow affair for which CBC was famous before the tabloid-style This Hour Has Seven Days revolutionized the network’s current-affairs programming the following year. If Pierre Trudeau appeared telegenic or sexy debating the distribution of taxation powers with future premier Parizeau, no one mentioned it.

  It is probably fair to say that until 1965 Trudeau was better known to English Canadians as an anti-nuclear activist and a civil libertarian than as any kind of political philosopher. In March 1962, for example, it was announced that the “Montreal lawyer and economist” Trudeau was to sit on the board of the Canadian Peace Research Institute, an initiative of the acclaimed Canadian nuclear scientist Norman Alcock.5 The following year, in an ironic twist that did not escape the notice of Trudeau’s critics in Quebec, English-Canadian editorialists lauded “Professor Trudeau” for defending the civil liberties of FLQ detainees held by Montreal police without charge or access to legal counsel.6 In January 1965, the Globe and Mail reported that Trudeau would sit on a five-person commission established by federal justice minister Guy Favreau to study “the problem of hate literature.”7 (On that commission, Trudeau would meet thirty-three-year-old University of Toronto professor Mark MacGuigan, setting in motion a long and close political association that would later see MacGuigan serve as Trudeau’s foreign minister.)

  Not until January 1965 did English Canadians get their first real introduction to Trudeau, when Peter C. Newman ventured to Montreal to interview him for the Toronto Star. At that time, the thirty-six-year-old Newman was a far bigger star in the Canadian cultural firmament than Trudeau and, in truth, a more influential presence in the national political conversation than many elected officials. He was still riding the crest of his massive success with Renegade in Power (1963), a groundbreaking political portrait of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker that had sold thirty thousand copies in its first ten weeks in print and vaulted Newman into the publishing stratosphere.8 If a single English Canadian can take credit for inventing Trudeau and sparking Trudeaumania, it is Newman. As the Star’s man in Ottawa in the 1960s and as the country’s leading popularizer of Canadian political history, Newman and his florid prose would become the narrative voice of Trudeau’s ascent in Canadian politics.

  Newman likely knew in January 1965 that Trudeau was sequestered away, grinding out his signature brief “Quebec and the Constitutional Problem.” He certainly recognized Trudeau as a formidable intellectual and iconoclast. “Trudeau, who works in a bare cubicle at the University of Montreal’s Institute of Public Law, is the founder of Cité libre, the journal which provided the Lesage reform movement with its original ideological thrust,” Newman wrote. “Now 45, he wears outrageously ill-matched clothes and maintains the detached view of his environment which has often got him into difficulties.” Even then a lively raconteur, Newman indulged his readers with the tale of how Trudeau had caused a “minor riot” in Moscow’s Red Square in 1952 by throwing snowballs at a statue of Stalin. For his part, Trudeau was only too happy to report to Newman that separatism was already a spent force in Quebec politics and, moreover, that ordinary Quebecers were more interested in bread-and-butter economic issues than in lofty appeals to nationalism.

  Newman concluded astutely that Trudeau may have spoken too soon. “Despite Trudeau’s optimism,” he warned, “the Quebec revolution could be reignited through unforeseen violence or a breakdown in the already strained relations between the Lesage and Pearson governments.”9

  Trudeau knew by 1962 that he and his small band of federalist allies in Quebec were powerless to stop the tsunami of maîtres chez nous nationalism. The key question, then, is not why they opted to join the Pearson Liberals in 1965 but why they did not do so sooner. The answer is a simple one. They were not welcome in the federal Liberal Party until the national-unity crisis had become truly desperate.

  Pierre Trudeau, Jean Marchand, and Gérard Pelletier—the “three wise men” or “les trois colombes”—began discussing the idea of entering federal politics together as early as 1961. Had it not been for Lester Pearson’s volte-face on the question of acquiring nuclear warheads for Canada’s Bomarc missiles, Trudeau and Marchand would likely have sought Liberal nominations in the 1963 federal election. But they were furious about Pearson’s nuclear flip-flop, Trudeau especially, judging it to be nothing but a crude political gamble designed to confound the Diefenbaker Tories. By agreeing to place nuclear warheads on Canadian soil, the Liberals had acted with “brutal cynicism” and “selfish docility,” Trudeau fumed in Cité libre. “What idiots they all are!”10 (He was not alone in his anger. The election took place a mere six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when superpower brinksmanship had very nearly brought the world to nuclear war.)11 In the 1963 campaign, Trudeau threw his support behind the NDP candidate in the riding of Mount Royal, Charles Taylor, rather than the Liberal incumbent, Alan Macnaughton. He did so in spite of his objection to the NDP’s deux nations policy on Quebec, so strong was his aversion to nuclear weapons.12

  On the Bomarc issue, the thick-skinned Pearson was not fazed by being called an idiot—by Pierre Trudeau or anyone else. “I was right and they were wrong,” he wrote bluntly of his critics.13 Moreover, as Pearson well knew, this was not Trudeau’s first shot across the federal Liberals’ bow. In his 1958 article “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec,” Trudeau had blasted the party for cynically maintaining its “machine” approach to Quebec politics well after it had abandoned the practice elsewhere in Canada. “The shameful incompetence of the average Liberal M.P. from Quebec was a welcome asset to the government,” Trudeau had asserted. “The party strategists had but to find an acceptable stable master—Laurier, Lapointe, St. Laurent—and the trained donkeys sitting in the back benches could be trusted to behave.”14 Trudeau knew, of course, that such comments did nothing to endear him to the Quebec caucus of the Liberal Party.15 More surprising, perhaps, was that some Liberal stalwarts from outside Quebec never forgave him for this drubbing. Toronto-area MP Ralph Cowan, for example, would wage a one-man vendetta against Trudeau well into the Trudeaumania period, circulating copies of his old speeches among party members with terms like “idiots” and “trained donkeys” duly highlighted.16

  “You can well imagine,” Trudeau wrote in a private letter to historian Ramsay Cook, who was then a member of the NDP, “that my decision to enter politics on the Liberal side was a difficult one.”17 The decision was just as difficult for the Liberals. Even if they ignored his earlier diatribes, they knew that Trudeau was a complete neophyte in electoral politics. His friends acknowledged as much. “There was no great pressure in the Liberal Party to get Trudeau to run,” Marc Lalonde later recalled. “Nobody in 1965 said, ‘Here goes the next PM.’ He still had this image of a semi-dilettante, and therefore that he would be a kind of patrician in politics—you know, do it for a while, and then go on to something else.”18

  The truth is that Pierre Trudeau was invited into federal politics in 1965 not as a messiah but as an adjunct. The real prize—the man Pearson had been courting for years—was the charismatic, bilingual Quebec labour leader Jean Marchand. “He was one of the most attractive personalities I had met in a long, long time,” Pearson said of Marchand, “quick in every respect: physically, mentally, emotionally.”19 The only problem was that Marchand flatly refused to enter federal politics without his friends Trudeau and Pelletier. “We are of the same generation,” said Marchand of the trio. “In going alone to Ottawa there woul
d be the risk of being overwhelmed. By being three, without necessarily always having the same views and the same ideas about things, we can enrich one another and protect one another.”20

  Pearson did not hesitate. Like any smart head coach, he agreed to take the second-stringers Trudeau and Pelletier in order to get the star Marchand. He just had to finesse the deal a little to satisfy his recalcitrant party colleagues, particularly when it came to the former Le Devoir editor, Pelletier. “It was more difficult to get enthusiastic acceptance in the organization for Pelletier than it was for the other two,” Pearson said later, “because, while Pierre Trudeau had made some pretty tough speeches about nuclear arms and about myself in that context, Pelletier had been writing editorials day after day about the iniquity of the Liberal regime. He had made it very hard for some of our men to get elected in 1963, and it was not easy for them to welcome him with open arms or, for one or two of them, to welcome Pierre Trudeau with any enthusiasm.”21

  As it happened, the prime minister’s plan to bring the three Montrealers into the Liberal caucus could not have been better timed. Over the course of 1964 and well into the 1965 federal election campaign, the party’s old guard from Quebec was hobbled by a series of low-grade scandals from which it would never recover. Two of Pearson’s ministers, Maurice Lamontagne and René Tremblay, were implicated in the so-called furniture scandal for having allegedly taken gifts in kind from a bankrupt Montreal furniture dealer. Yvon Dupuis, Pearson’s minister of state, was charged with conspiracy and influence-peddling for allegedly taking a bribe in the course of licensing a racetrack in his riding (he was later acquitted). Most damning of all, Guy Favreau, Pearson’s justice minister and the head of the Quebec caucus, was forced to resign following the “Rivard affair,” in which government officials were alleged to have taken bribes to abet the prison escape of a Quebec drug dealer.

  The tarnishing of so many leading Quebec Liberals was a gift to Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau, and they knew it.22 The party had sanctioned members of the old guard, Trudeau reiterated smugly in 1964, “not so much for their ability to serve democracy as for their ability to make democracy serve their party, their main qualification being familiarity with machine politicians and schemers.”23 If he and his friends had anything to say about it, Trudeau was signalling, the days when Quebecers would sit quietly in the backbenches and let English Canadians run the country were over.

  Lester B. Pearson is today a far more venerated Canadian prime minister than he was in his own time. As his biographer Andrew Cohen has observed, Pearson’s long list of policy firsts—the Canada Pension Plan, the Medical Care Act, the Order of Canada, the Canadian flag—have taken their place as some of the most important identity markers for modern Canadians.24

  Where the Pearson Liberals foundered was on the national-unity file, though not for want of trying. The arch-Tory John Diefenbaker was prime minister when the Quiet Revolution transformed Quebec in the early 1960s. He dismissed French-Canadian nationalism and openly stonewalled Quebecers’ deux nations conception of Canada with the blunt assertion that as long as he was in charge, there could be but “one Canada.” Pearson, on the other hand, who spent the years 1958 to 1963 as leader of the Opposition, was sympathetic to Quebec nationalism and temperamentally inclined to accommodate it. “While Quebec is a province in this national confederation,” he observed in a 1963 speech, “it is more than a province because it is the heartland of a people. In a very real sense it is a nation within a nation.”25 After winning the April 1963 federal election—albeit with only a minority government—Pearson actively sought out new opportunities to reform Canadian federalism. He believed that if the central government ceded certain powers to the provinces, particularly in matters of social and cultural policy, it could meet Quebecers’ demand that they be maîtres chez nous without undermining national unity.

  One vehicle through which the new prime minister hoped to achieve these reforms was the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (the Bi and Bi Commission), which he launched in 1963 under the leadership of Davidson Dunton, president of Carleton University, and André Laurendeau, editor of Le Devoir. For months, the ten-member commission held informal hearings across Canada. Its official mandate was to report on the status of Canadian francophones in government bureaucracies, private businesses, and public education, but it ended up taking the pulse of the entire country. On February 1, 1965, the Bi and Bi Commission released its highly anticipated interim report (the so-called Blue Pages). “Canada, without being fully conscious of the fact, is passing through the gravest crisis in its history,” it announced ominously. “What is at stake is the very fact of Canada: what kind of country will it be? Will it continue to exist?”26 Although the commissioners’ own opinions varied as greatly as those expressed in the mountain of briefs and transcripts they had amassed, they unanimously recommended a national policy of two official languages for Canada.27 But the big story was the public “uproar” the commission itself had caused, as Pearson put it.28 On its first day in print, the Blue Pages sold an incredible five thousand copies, becoming an instant bestseller and demonstrating that national unity was a growing national obsession.

  In July 1964, when Laurendeau, Dunton, and their co-commissioners were still out on the road talking to Canadians, Prime Minister Pearson and the premiers convened a federal-provincial meeting in Charlottetown, P.E.I. The idea was to pay homage to the Confederation conference that had been held in that city one hundred years earlier and to use the anniversary to sign off on the “Fulton-Favreau formula” for amending the Canadian Constitution. Named after Diefenbaker’s and Pearson’s justice ministers, this complex amending procedure had been negotiated by the feds and the provinces over several years. It envisaged different thresholds of consensus for different sorts of constitutional change. But on the key question of language, it demanded full-blown federal-provincial unanimity. Bora Laskin, then a University of Toronto law professor and later chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, observed at the time that the Fulton-Favreau formula was far too “rigid” and thus “too high a price to pay for what would be a rather empty trapping of independence.”29 Like most of Canada’s constitutional scholars, including Pierre Trudeau, Laskin was wary of both decentralization and constitutional tinkering. In the end, though, the debate over Fulton-Favreau mattered little. To Pearson’s everlasting disappointment, the formula foundered in 1965 when the Lesage government withdrew its support.

  Like so many of his successors, Prime Minister Pearson was far more successful in accommodating Quebec’s demands through practical negotiations on specific problems than through sweeping constitutional change. He consulted often with Premier Jean Lesage, whom he knew well but thought “highly strung, brilliant and rather temperamental.”30 Pearson’s government institutionalized new channels of federal-provincial coordination, even helping to facilitate the international outreach of Quebec’s cultural agencies.31 Before establishing the Canada Pension Plan, for example, the feds met secretly with the Lesage government not only to negotiate the conditions under which Quebec could opt out but to make the idea palatable to the rest of the provinces.32 So great and so genuine was Pearson’s eagerness to accommodate Quebec that by 1965 his efforts began to look, even to impartial observers, like appeasement.33 “The dynamism of the new Quebec and the confused and undiscriminating responses of the rest of the country to its demands have resulted in a situation where Canadians as such are not agreed on pursuing a common set of important purposes together,” wrote UBC political scientist Donald Smiley, echoing the Bi and Bi report. “Some such consensus must be created in the foreseeable future if Confederation is to survive in recognizable form.”34

  Pierre Trudeau shared Smiley’s views entirely. If the Canadian prime minister himself held a deux nations notion of the country, there would be no satiating the nationalist appetites of Quebec (or even Canadian) politicians. Trudeau did not attend Pearson’s Charlottetown conference in July 1964, but he
did submit a thirty-one-page brief (in English) entitled “Concepts of Federalism.” It contained all of the defining elements of the political program he had formulated in “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” and “Quebec and the Constitutional Problem,” but it came bundled with prescriptive advice for the English-Canadian politicians he presumed would now be reading him. Only federalism, wrote Trudeau, could find “a rational compromise between the divergent interest-groups which history has thrown together.” And only a functional politics could dissolve “the glue of nationalism,” Trudeau wrote. “I am not predicting which way Canada will turn. But because it seems obvious to me that nationalism—and of course I mean the Canadian as well as the Quebec variety—has put her on a collision course, I am suggesting that cold, unemotional rationality can still save the ship.”35

  Trudeau concluded his 1964 Charlottetown brief with an appeal for a “constitutional bill of rights binding on all governments in Canada,” an idea he had been kicking around since 1955. If Canada were to entrench a bill of rights, he observed, “problems such as centralism, regionalism and provincial autonomy would be drained of much of their emotional content, and would become amenable to rational solution.”36 In public, Trudeau continued to state categorically that the British North America Act contained all the tools necessary for Canada and Quebec to boldly reimagine Canadian federalism. But when he had the opportunity to place his ideas directly into the hands of Canada’s power brokers, as at Charlottetown, he made it clear that he had conceptualized his own Plan B for Canada. It was a bold and brazen vision. If federal and provincial politicians could not act rationally in the interests of all Canadian citizens, he was suggesting, then power must be vested in the citizens themselves.