What Prime Minister Pearson thought of Trudeau’s proposed bill of rights in the summer of 1964 is difficult to discern. Not until the fall of 1967 would Pearson adopt Trudeau’s ideas as the federal government’s position, and only because the pressure from Quebec for constitutional change was by then implacable. In any case, when Trudeau, Marchand, and Pelletier were making their way to Ottawa in 1965, Pearson kept to his own conciliatory script—undoubtedly in the belief that the addition of such strong Quebec voices would bolster his bargaining power.
Some of Trudeau’s friends, Ramsay Cook among them, had their doubts. “Pearson seemed to believe, perhaps drawing on his experience as a diplomat, that every problem could be solved by compromise,” Cook later observed. “By 1965 I had concluded that while the Lesage Liberals were as unclear as anyone else about exactly what Quebec wanted, they nevertheless would continue to expand their demands indefinitely. Someone had to call Quebec’s bluff, and Pierre Trudeau seemed to be the person.”37
On September 7, 1965, Lester Pearson announced that a general federal election would be held on November 8. His two-and-a-half-year-old minority government had lasted longer than anyone expected, he told the House of Commons, and it had passed some important legislation. But Opposition MPs had returned to the fall session of Parliament determined to defeat the Liberals, so it was in the national interest that he seek a new mandate. “My decision had to be made in the knowledge that we are now facing, in Canada, issues and problems of great importance to our country’s future,” Pearson explained. The most pressing of these problems was the need to “reduce tensions in our country so that we can all go forward as Canadians, in unity and strength.”38
For weeks, the prime minister’s election plans had been the subject of mostly indolent speculation. Few Canadians believed that an election was warranted if, as they suspected, Pearson’s main reason for calling one was simply to win himself a Liberal majority. There had been four elections since 1957, all but one had returned a minority government, and neither of the two major parties had had a change in leadership since 1958. Canadians rightly asked whether the spectacle of a fourth Pearson-Diefenbaker contest in seven years was worth either the effort or the expense. Peter C. Newman captured the public mood perfectly with the title of the book he was then writing, The Distemper of Our Times.
Given the alarmist tone of the Bi and Bi report and Quebec City’s increasingly strident demands for a new deal within Confederation, it was in Pearson’s power to make national unity the defining issue of the 1965 election. But he opted not to do so. He would run instead on a stay-the-course platform of economic and social-welfare reforms—important issues, without question, but too little differentiated from his 1963 platform to appease disgruntled voters. Pearson would live to regret this strategic blunder. From the beginning of the campaign to the day they voted, Canadians gave every impression that they neither knew nor cared what the election was really about. And not surprisingly, their ballots would reflect that caustic sentiment.
In this sense, Pierre Trudeau’s entry into federal politics was anticlimactic. He, Marchand, and Pelletier had given up high-flying careers in Montreal to prevent the breakup of Canada. Yet outside Quebec, almost without exception, the stand-pat choreography of the 1965 election campaign made the three candidates little more than curiosities to ordinary Canadian voters. This fact alone explains why Trudeau appeared to come out of nowhere to take the country by storm three years later.
Inside Quebec, it was a different story. On September 2, five days before Pearson’s election call, Le Devoir leaked the story that Jean Marchand (always first-mentioned), Gérard Pelletier, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau were in secret negotiations with the prime minister to run as Liberal candidates. Speaking freely to the Quebec press over the next few days, Marchand acknowledged that there had been agreement “in principle,” essentially confirming that he would indeed be heading up the Liberal Party’s “New Wave.”39 The official announcement came on September 10, when Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau held a standing-room-only press conference at a Montreal hotel.40 Three members of the party’s old guard—Guy Favreau, Maurice Lamontagne, and Maurice Sauvé—dutifully accompanied the new men, wearing “great big plaster smiles,” as the Toronto Star’s Dominique Clift put it.41 With the scandalous “Rivard affair” still in the headlines, the old guard understood that they must make way for the heirs apparent. (Indeed, Lamontagne, ever loyal to Pearson, had orchestrated the Liberals’ “new look.”) It fell to Trudeau to explain to intrigued reporters why he and his friends were now in cahoots with the Liberals. “Quebec’s role will be fulfilled not by withdrawing and turning inward, but by accepting the challenge of living in a pluralistic society,” he said. “The Liberal Party is the instrument most likely to help Quebec assume a role within Confederation and not outside it.”42
If Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau thought their entry into federal politics would be smooth, they were mistaken. Quebecers had good memories and so, too, did other Canadians. Maurice Lamontagne’s best efforts notwithstanding, the three newcomers were so unpopular within the Quebec wing of the party that the Liberals had difficulty finding safe ridings for them. “Their leftward-leaning opinions as well as their attacks on the Liberal ‘slush fund’ and the party’s undemocratic structure in Quebec have earned them plenty of ill-will,” noted one observer.43 The Globe and Mail ran an editorial dredging up Trudeau’s invective against the party just two years earlier. “The philosophy of the Liberal Party is very simple,” Trudeau had said in 1963. “Say anything, think anything, or what is better, do not think at all but put us in power because it is us who govern you best.” Trudeau’s sudden conversion merely confirmed the wisdom of his own critique, admonished the Globe. Canadians should reject the Liberals’ blatant hypocrisy and opportunism. “It would be a reckless country indeed that gave them the power they demand.”44
More unexpectedly, perhaps, Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau were also popularly seen as having burned bridges with New Democrats. Quebec NDP leader Robert Cliche, who had himself defected from the Liberal Party in 1960, believed that if the trio had shown the least bit of grit, they would have joined the New Democrats. On September 8, Cliche published an open letter in Le Devoir stating that Marchand and his friends had cynically abandoned their social-democratic principles in favour of the “progressive pragmatism” of the Liberal Party.45 Stealing the three Quebecers from the NDP was “the cleverest intellectual holdup ever organized” by the federal Liberals in Quebec, railed Cliche.46 A week later, he gave a tough speech in Quebec City in which he predicted that the three Liberal newcomers would be “gobbled up” by the business class that owned the party.47
Tory leader John Diefenbaker was delighted with Pearson’s election call, of course. Hoping that voters would punish the scandal-plagued Liberals at the polls, he was only too happy to fuel Canadians’ disenchantment. Diefenbaker reminded voters that he was the only party leader with the fortitude to stand firm against Premier Jean Lesage’s escalating demands. Now that the three wise men, and Pierre Trudeau in particular, had arrived in Ottawa to fight for a united Canada, Diefenbaker went on the offensive. Speaking in Brownsburg, Quebec, he reminded a partisan crowd that Trudeau had once said of the Liberals, “There doesn’t seem to be an individual in the party to whom principles mean more than power.” Now, however, Trudeau and his friends were hoping that Canadians would forget their past. “These are the men who now say they saw a new light!” hooted Diefenbaker.48 Quebec Progressive Conservative Association president Jacques Bouchard also disparaged the trio. “They’ve entered the arena at last and will be watched with interest,” Bouchard told an Amos, Quebec, crowd, “but I don’t think they’ll be the Maurice Richards of the Liberals.”49
The heat on at least two of the wise men—Trudeau and Pelletier—was so intense that they felt compelled to defend their decision to join the Liberals in a jointly written article in Cité libre. “For Quebeckers in search of a dynamic fede
ralism and of a progressive social policy, the Liberal option at this time is the most realistic and the most constructive,” they wrote. “For us, there has been no break and we renounce none of our convictions. We have resolved only to lead in another setting and through different means the intellectual and social struggles we have always led.”50
The English-Canadian press corps was mostly unimpressed with Pearson’s early election call, calling it cynical and wasteful. (In this estimation, they were joined by much of the world press, from the New York Times to Pravda.) Yet many of the country’s leading news outlets had by this time adopted the language of crisis to describe Quebec’s demand for a new constitutional deal within Confederation. In early September 1965, to cite but one example among many, the Canadian Press posted an alarmist report, quoting Oxford professor Max Beloff to the effect that separatism or even associate statehood for Quebec could be “fatal” for Canada.51 Dailies across Canada duly reprinted such stories, invoking the doom-laden tone of the Bi and Bi report.
In this unsettled atmosphere, many Canadian editorialists were plainly relieved by the appearance in federal politics of such distinguished Quebecers as Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau—but not unreservedly. “Trudeau, after fifteen years of sniping from the sidelines, finally decided to join the Liberals,” wrote Keith Cronshaw of the Montreal Gazette, the English-language daily with the largest stake in the constitutional debate.52 The Globe and Mail called Pearson’s recruitment of the three Montrealers a “truly exciting occurrence” but insisted that they more properly belonged in the NDP.53 Before the Globe was willing to give the trio its endorsement, Canadians would have to know “how far left of centre are their views on such nonracial subjects as the welfare state and the nation’s economy.”54 A Toronto Star editorial gushed about what a “prize catch” the three Quebecers were. “In effect, three of the best minds and hearts in French Canada have decided to join in the main task of nation-building,” said the Star.55 Peter C. Newman called Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand “the Three Musketeers” in his Star column. “These gallant, middle-aged ex-revolutionaries have taken a risky stand,” Newman wrote, “which clearly identifies them as Quebeckers who believe in the Canadian future.”56
Even those not entirely enamoured of Trudeau and his friends agreed that they had shown courage in entering federal politics, not least because they had been cast as “traitors” to Quebec by the likes of the RIN’s Pierre Bourgault.57 “Unlike many other aspiring politicians,” the Globe and Mail noted wryly, “Mr. Gerard Pelletier, Mr. Jean Marchand and Mr. Pierre-Elliott Trudeau were not motivated by dreams of fame and influence—and $18,000 a year—which attract most members of Parliament.”58
On September 26, 1965, Trudeau announced that he would seek the Liberal nomination in Mount Royal, a seat the party had held since 1940 and considered safe. “It is a riding which as far as I can see has a democratic organization, a fairly active association and a very honest one,” he told reporters. “It has a mixed population, English-speaking and French-speaking, with several ethnic groups within each language group. It is the kind of riding I’d like to work in and a convention where I’d stand a good chance.”59 Alan Macnaughton—the Liberal incumbent against whom New Democrat Charles Taylor had run in 1963 with Trudeau’s support—graciously announced his retirement to make way for Trudeau. A minor controversy erupted because Mount Royal was considered by some constituents to be a “Jewish riding” in need of a Jewish MP. But Trudeau paid scant attention to it. He was far more anxious about the prospect of running against Charles Taylor, with whom he disagreed fundamentally on the concept of deux nations but maintained a close professional relationship.60
In contrast with Marchand and Pelletier, whose nominations went unchallenged in the ridings of Quebec West and Montreal Hochelaga, respectively, Trudeau had a fight on his hands. Competing for the Mount Royal nomination were Monty Berger, a public-relations executive, Sophie Cresthol, the widow of long-time Liberal MP Leon Cresthol, and Victor Goldbloom, a Montreal pediatrician. Vote-carrying delegates in the riding association numbered 265, but nearly a thousand people turned out on the evening of October 7 to hear the “law professor and millionaire bachelor” Trudeau debate his challengers.61
By all accounts, there was not the slightest hint of Trudeaumania in evidence on that auspicious night. Whereas the charismatic Jean Marchand was already out on the campaign trail tearing strips off the Tories—“A federal government which crushes the provinces and imposes one language from coast to coast—you may achieve this, Diefenbaker, but over our dead bodies!”—Trudeau’s political skills were described as “fledgling,” his personality as “coldly logical.”62 Yet pedantic though it was, Trudeau’s first political speech contained all the key elements of the program he had been developing since the 1950s. He was opposed to Quebec separatism, he told the Mount Royal crowd, but also to Canada’s becoming “a loose confederation of provinces.” He was not in favour of “tinkering” with the Constitution, since he believed that the British North America Act contained the right balance of powers. “I pledge to maintain Confederation intact,” Trudeau concluded, “and to help this country achieve the great future which I believe is in store for it.”63
Always better in print than at the podium, Trudeau distributed a one-page “Open Letter to the Delegates to the Mount Royal Nominating Committee” to shore up his candidacy. Again, he highlighted the key elements of his program, including his commitment to Canadian federalism and his worry that Quebec was drifting towards “extreme provincialism.” The letter began, “After many years as a critic of the political scene, I decided to take an active part in politics and for the first time joined a political party. The Liberal party provides me with the best means of fulfilling my political ideals.”64 The prose was not his most exhilarating, but the Mount Royal delegates must have liked what they heard and read. On October 8, Trudeau won the nomination on the first ballot (the vote count was not made public). The scene was thus set in Mount Royal for the battle of the academics, as one observer put it, Trudeau versus Taylor.
As it turned out, there was not much of a battle—in Mount Royal or anywhere else. Across Canada, turnouts at all-candidates meetings were abysmally low, confirming voters’ indifference. Most Canadians perceived that the Liberals had concluded the campaign just as they had started it—by appealing to voters for a majority mandate but saying little about what they hoped to accomplish with it. On election night, November 8, Canadians voted almost exactly as they had in 1963, their distemper now fully fused. The Liberals were returned with a second minority government, winning 131 seats of 265—a meagre four-seat increase. Only 74.8 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot, compared with 79.2 per cent in 1963. The prime minister was said to be “bitterly disappointed” by the election results, but he rejected any suggestion that he would make common cause with the NDP.65 British Columbia premier W.A.C. Bennett spoke for many exasperated Canadian voters. “I’m very pleased that the people of Canada did not give a majority to the Pearson government because as I said in the election campaign, they had not earned the right to it,” Bennett said. “And now the prime minister has no alternative but to resign.”66
Pearson did not resign, of course, but instead suffered through one of the most merciless media onslaughts ever to greet a victorious Canadian prime minister. “The Liberal Party subjected the electorate to the most sophisticated, the most premeditated, the most cold-blooded blackmail this country has ever seen in an election,” complained a Globe and Mail editorial. “Give us a majority, they threatened, or you will face another election within weeks. As it should always be with blackmail, the people declined to submit.”67 British Columbians congratulated themselves for “refusing to go along with Liberal pleas for majority government” and voting for the status quo (the exception being the addition of a new B.C. seat for Social Credit).68 Only in Quebec did Liberals make notable gains. Their share of the popular vote, at just over 45 per cent, was the same as it had been
in 1963. But they acquired eight additional seats for a total of fifty-five (of seventy-four). Even so, Quebec’s pundits were unimpressed. “Les Canadiens ont voté exactement pour rien” (Canadians voted exactly for nothing), observed the Journal de Montréal.69 “Du pareil au même” (Just more of the same), added Le Soleil.70
All three of the wise men were elected—Trudeau and Pelletier easily, Marchand only with a last-minute surge to defeat Créditiste Lucien Plourde.71 There was never any doubt that the Liberals would hold on to Mount Royal. Trudeau won handily, with 27,877 votes to Charles Taylor’s 14,911. It was a decisive victory, but Taylor could take credit for reducing the Liberal vote since 1963, when Alan Macnaughton had won with 28,793 votes to Taylor’s 8,911.72 At 9 p.m., Charles Taylor called Trudeau at his headquarters on chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges to concede defeat.
“I’ll be back again, Pierre,” said Taylor.
“You’ll be welcome,” replied Trudeau.73
Taylor was gracious in defeat but not uncritical. “It is always sad to see a man of the left in a right-wing party,” he told the Quebec press. “Canada has demonstrated a new polarization of its politics between two parties. My friend Pierre Elliott Trudeau has been elected through the votes of conservatives.”74 (Taylor would take one last shot at elected office, in 1968. After that, as his sister Gretta Chambers has recalled recently, “he decided to settle down and become a philosopher.”)75
Trudeau gave a short but ponderous victory address. “This vote is a clear indication of ethnic and cultural maturity in a riding with a small minority of French-Canadians,” he told his constituents. “The fact that I am the first French-Canadian chosen to represent you is, to me, an indication that Canada can, if it wishes, hold fast to that ideology deeming all men equal.”76 Ambushed by a CBC journalist before he knew that the Liberals had failed to win a majority, Trudeau made far more assertive off-the-cuff remarks. “I still think that the Liberal government can do a darn good job in Ottawa,” he said, “and I think the onus will be on the opposition now to try and defeat any laws which we think are urgent for the future of the country.”77 Asked (in English) whether the strengthened Quebec contingent in the Liberal caucus would mean an inordinate focus on that province, Trudeau rejected the idea. “It will not be biased toward Quebec,” he said of the new Liberal government. “It will be governing for Canada as a whole.”78 Later in the evening, Trudeau joined Pelletier and Marchand for a victory celebration at the Club de réforme in Montreal.79 His friends joked that it was now too late for him to back out of federal politics.
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