Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  Canadians took note of the changing of the Liberal guard in Quebec. The election had “purged the taint of scandal,” wrote the Vancouver Sun’s man in Montreal, Stan McDowell. “With its new and highly respected recruits, the party can now begin to rebuild its prestige.”80 Frank Howard at the Globe and Mail warned that a second Liberal minority government might “make it easier than ever for Quebec to slip quietly and almost painlessly out of Confederation.”81 Howard’s Globe colleague Robert Rice, on the other hand, speculated that the progressive views of Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand “would dovetail with the demands of the NDP, and help to keep the Government in power despite its lack of a majority.”82

  The big story coming out of Quebec on election night, however, had nothing to do with ballots. A bomb threat was received at a polling station in the Montreal riding of Cartier, prompting officials to evacuate the building and call in the bomb squad. “I received the word from Ottawa to clear the polls,” said returning officer Jean Bouchard. “I’ve been pretty rattled by the whole thing.”83 Other irregularities reported from Montreal included the break-and-enter theft of Liberal voting lists from party offices and vandalism at Guy Favreau’s riding headquarters. Police cruisers had had to patrol all of the city’s polling stations.

  The final edition of the Vancouver Sun ran the sensational front-page headline, in forty-eight-point type, “‘Bomb’ Slows Montreal Voting.”84 Minority governments had become a Canadian commonplace. Separatist violence had not.

  Prime Minister Pearson had missed one enormous opportunity when he chose not to put national unity at the centre of the 1965 campaign. He missed another when he selected his new ministers.

  Jean Marchand entered the cabinet directly, as everyone knew he would. But he was named minister of citizenship and immigration, a second-tier appointment that highlighted Pearson’s continuing reluctance to put a Quebecer in charge of a financially significant portfolio (finance, trade and commerce, external affairs, defence, health and welfare, transport).85 Some Canadians’ hopes were dashed. The Quebec caucus was once again “padded” with mediocrity, lamented Peter C. Newman. “Not only did [Pearson] by-pass the luminous talents of Pierre-Elliott Trudeau and Gérard Pelletier, but he also failed to promote Jean Chrétien, a young but solid New Guarder.”86 Only in January 1967—over a year later—would Pearson promote Marchand to the position of Quebec leader. This was an important symbolic gesture, but it failed to mitigate the perception in some quarters that English Canadians were still running the country.

  One person who was not disappointed by Pearson’s cautious cabinet manoeuvres was Pierre Trudeau. The newly elected member from Mount Royal wanted to ease into his new job. This meant mastering his brief as a novice MP but also, apparently, striking the right work-life balance. On January 3, 1966, the Liberal caucus met for the first time since the election to confer upon Pearson the traditional unanimous vote of confidence. Trudeau was one of only six MPs missing from the meeting. He was “on holiday.”87 When the prime minister informed Jean Marchand that he was considering naming Trudeau as his own parliamentary secretary, Marchand had to strong-arm his friend into accepting the opportunity.

  “Give me time to get settled, to do my homework. You know I don’t like to go into anything unprepared,” Trudeau pleaded.

  “We didn’t come here to refuse to work, Pierre,” Marchand replied. “What brought us here is that there’s a job to be done, and we have to grab every opportunity to do it.”88

  Trudeau agreed to take the position, which essentially meant serving as the prime minister’s mouthpiece in the House of Commons. Once again, the country’s pundits mined out Trudeau’s earlier jabs at Pearson and the Liberals, drawing Canadians’ attention to the “amusing irony” that he would now serve as Pearson’s underling.89

  Where the prime minister actually stood on the Quebec question at this critical juncture remains the subject of debate. Historian Kenneth McRoberts believes that Pearson never gave up on the idea that Quebec was “a nation within a nation.” He therefore sought to groom Jean Marchand rather than Pierre Trudeau as his successor, in part because Marchand “did not have the same objections as Trudeau to special arrangements for Quebec, nor did he share Trudeau’s visceral antagonism to Quebec nationalism.”90

  But Pearson’s position on Marchand and Trudeau may have been more nuanced, even in early 1966. In his diary, André Laurendeau related a fascinating conversation on January 25 of that year, after bumping into his old friend Jean Marchand. (The two had worked together most recently on the Bi and Bi Commission.) “Pierre T.” was astounding English Canadians, Marchand told Laurendeau. “I’m willing to bet my shirt that within a year Pierre will be their big man in French Canada, eclipsing all the others.” At this news, Laurendeau “made a face.” He told Marchand that the anti-nationalist Trudeau was “a poor informer when it comes to present-day Quebec.” Marchand responded sympathetically. “I wanted him in Finance,” he told Laurendeau. “But when I learned the Prime Minister wanted him close by, what could I do?” Laurendeau concluded this diary entry by noting that Marchand had taken the extraordinary step of warning Pearson “in writing” about Trudeau’s being out of step with Quebecers.91

  Wherever Pearson might have stood, no one had trouble decoding the optics of Trudeau’s promotion to parliamentary secretary. Opposition leader John Diefenbaker observed haughtily that the Liberals finally appeared to be “running away” from special status.92 “In the national field I say deliberately that this is a government which has whittled away the basic principles of Confederation,” Diefenbaker told the House of Commons on January 20, 1966.

  It has bent to demands. It has virtually brought about a position in this country whereby provinces may become, if not sovereign states, associated states. I am glad to see that there are now some in the Liberal party who are standing against that. I think of the hon. member for Mount Royal (Mr. Trudeau), already honoured as Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister. Read what he has to say about this idea of special status for any one province or associate states. He takes the strongest possible objection. It is of interest that when we took that stand we were pictured as being anti-Quebec. What was heresy when we stood for it is now approaching orthodoxy within the Liberal party.93

  Other Canadians agreed that Trudeau had moved a considerable distance up Ottawa’s greasy pole. “This New Wave Liberal, with his vast knowledge of political and economic affairs, will likely be playing a key role in the establishment of federal policies toward Quebec,” observed the Toronto Star’s Dominique Clift. “As parliamentary assistant to Prime Minister Lester Pearson and as one of his trusted advisers, Trudeau will be in a strategic position to make his influence felt.”94

  Clift was correct. Trudeau was now in a strategic position, and it was not an opportunity he intended to squander. Over the winter of 1966, Trudeau began to hit his stride, both as a stump speaker and as a parliamentarian. With ever-increasing rhetorical precision and power, he offered his Liberal colleagues, Parliament, and Canadians in general his views on how best to move federalism forward. On the evening of February 23, 1966, for instance, Pierre Berton interviewed Trudeau on his CTV television show. Berton asked Trudeau directly what he thought about Quebec’s demand for special status. “You can’t have an operative system of government,” Trudeau replied, “if one part of it, province or state, has a very different set of relationships to the central government than the other provinces.”95 Trudeau also suggested that the federal government stop crafting policies that allowed Quebec to opt out—the modus operandi of the Pearson Liberals, though he did not say so expressly. Pressed by Berton as to whether he would “go against” Quebecers on special status, Trudeau replied with the bravado for which he was becoming well known. “That’s their tough luck, Mr. Berton.”96

  Other opportunities followed. In May 1966, Trudeau told a Montreal meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that bilingualism could be legislated, but biculturalism could not
. “There is no way in which two ethnic groups can be made equal before the law in one country,” he said. “To talk of two nations is to introduce something corrosive.”97 To the Canadian Club of Montreal, Trudeau argued that the effect of special status would be to reduce recognition of Quebec in the rest of Canada. “If Quebec is to be the nation-state of the French Canadians, then the rest of the country will be the nation-state of the English-speaking,” he observed. “Under this type of set-up, French-speaking persons would have no reason to be in Ottawa.”98 Speaking in Vancouver, Trudeau warned English Canadians not to underestimate the sovereignist threat to Canada. “Once a section of a nation finds that the values it holds precious would be better protected by withdrawing from that nation, then there is nothing you can do to prevent the withdrawal.”99

  In Parliament, where Trudeau now had one of the best seats in the house (compared to Pelletier, who was stranded on the remotest backbench), he was not only becoming “more vocal” but impressing the gallery with his “facetious interjections during Opposition speeches.”100 In June 1966, Independent Progressive Conservative MP Maurice Allard asked Trudeau to set up a joint parliamentary committee on the Constitution, followed by a national constitutional conference. Trudeau rejected the proposal outright, calling it “absolutely useless.”101 Not only would such a committee do nothing to advance the constitutional debate, Trudeau told Allard, but it would become “a place of discord or mutual sterilization.”102 A week later, the Opposition raised the matter again, suggesting that an all-party constitutional committee could take advantage of “the spirit of our centenary” and reaffirm national unity. Trudeau was again dismissive. “Members of the opposition who are asking for this committee remind me of men walking in the dark who do not know where they are going and who want to hold hands with other people because they are afraid of getting lost alone,” he replied. “I think this is the precise time when we should not throw the constitution open to this kind of debate.”103

  At this early stage of his political career, Trudeau was still extraordinarily patient in his verbal responses to Opposition parliamentarians—knowing, of course, that he spoke for the prime minister. (Hansard for these years is filled with page upon page of Trudeau’s painstaking expositions.) But every once in a while, he demonstrated his dry wit. Créditiste MP (and sovereignist) Gilles Grégoire, for example, asked the following question of Trudeau during a tedious 1966 debate on agricultural production. “If the minister wants to quote statistics in this house, he should also be ready to give the source of such statistics. Otherwise, how can we know what they are worth? He did not quote the source of his statistics. What is the source of his statistics, that is what we want to know from the minister.” Trudeau’s answer: “Statisticians.”104

  In the spring of 1966, when Trudeau was only three months into his tenure as parliamentary secretary, a watershed event occurred—for him and for Canada. Over the weekend of March 25, the founding convention of the Quebec section of the National Liberal Federation of Canada was held in Quebec City. The convention was attended by roughly 1,200 Quebec Liberals, representing nearly every federal riding in the province. Sixty wide-ranging policy resolutions were tabled, many of them openly nationalist, others designed to promote biculturalism in Canada, one even demanding the abolition of the monarchy.

  Into this cacophony of competing voices strode Trudeau, who over three days dominated the meeting and imprinted the Quebec wing of the party with his own ideas. At a workshop on “constitutional realism,” Trudeau stood firmly against “provincial autonomists” like Michel Robert and argued that there was no need to open the Constitution.105 He ridiculed Quebecers who wanted to spend “undetermined sums of money in a constitutional adventure which they have not defined, but which would consist more or less of undermining Canadian federalism and substituting a still vague form of sovereignty which would give birth to something like an independent Quebec, or associate states, or a special status, or a loose alliance of ten states, or something to be invented after political, economic and social chaos had been achieved.”106 Trudeau sponsored several key resolutions, all of which the convention ultimately approved. These included transferring social security to the provinces along with the tax resources to support this responsibility, and institutionalizing permanent federal-provincial consultation on economic policies.107 “Quebec should not isolate itself in any way,” Trudeau lectured his Liberal colleagues, “but rather integrate itself in a larger complex where it will not only find markets, but also competition.”108

  This performance was a tour de force. Trudeau was subsequently heralded as the most influential policy-maker at the convention and the main reason why the nationalist “extremists” present—many of them young Liberals—“took a beating.”109 The Globe and Mail devoted an editorial to the event, congratulating the three wise men for speaking “in a straightforward fashion for which their party had not recently been noted. They were strong, but they were reasonable; and they were able to take, and persuade the convention to take, a more Canadian—as opposed to Quebec—position than has yet come out of Quebec.”110 Trudeau was widely praised for saying that the only constitutional changes he would approve were those that granted all provinces equal autonomy and those that treated anglophones and francophones equally. Peter C. Newman, who attended the convention, recognized that Trudeau’s ideas had the power to transform Pearson’s national-unity policy. “By officially committing themselves to keeping Quebec not only within confederation, but within the existing constitution, the federal Liberals have, for the first time, achieved a coherent point of view to defend.”111

  Newman interviewed Trudeau in the aftermath of the convention. Trudeau knew that he had set Quebec Liberals on a new trajectory, of course, but he also appreciated that this was no time for self-congratulation. “The main thing is that we rejected any kind of special status for Quebec,” he told Newman. “In essence the meeting was an affirmation that federalism can’t work unless all the provinces are in basically the same relations toward the central government, and that the federal system as it was conceived by the fathers of confederation is still sound.”112 Far from taking credit himself for the outcome of the conference, Trudeau mused about the lift it had given his boss. “When you think of the next big hurdles,” Trudeau told Newman, “bilingualism and constitutional rights, Pearson is the best man to achieve results. If these battles are won, Pearson will probably emerge very strong.”113

  Newman and every other close observer of the Quebec scene could not miss the irony that Trudeau should credit the prime minister for steering the Canadian ship of state on its new course—Lester Pearson, the man whose directionless leadership was the very reason Trudeau had entered politics. English-language media that reported on the Liberal convention featured photographs of Trudeau for the first time, most of them unremarkable head shots. No one was yet enamoured of Trudeau’s sparkling blue eyes and boyish good looks. It was his ideas they were falling for.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FORKS IN THE ROAD

  On April 4, 1967, Pierre Trudeau bounded up the stairs of Parliament wearing a tailored blue pinstriped suit, vest, and dark tie. He was tanned and fit from a week of skiing. He would turn forty-seven the following October, but with his hair combed forward “in the style now in favor with younger ad men,” as one observer put it, he looked as if he were in his thirties.1 The parliamentary press corps was by now used to Trudeau’s beatnik wardrobe—corduroy trousers, turtlenecks, bulky sweaters. But today, he was all spit and polish. Something important had to be in the offing.

  It was. During the afternoon session of Parliament, Prime Minister Lester Pearson announced dramatic changes to the Liberal cabinet. Two old-guard Quebecers, Lucien Cardin and Guy Favreau, retired from the cabinet and federal politics altogether. Jean Chrétien, then thirty-three, became parliamentary secretary to the finance minister, Mitchell Sharp. Thirty-eight-year-old John Turner was named registrar general. And Pierre Trudeau, now just a year
and a half into his political career, was sworn in as justice minister, the top legal job in Canada. Introducing his new lineup to the press, Pearson joked that everyone knew Trudeau was up for a promotion because he had shown up in the House of Commons wearing a tie.2 Trudeau, Turner, and Chrétien posed for photographs with the prime minister. “The four of us are a pretty good young quartet,” said the sixty-nine-year-old Pearson. “But take a picture of them six months from now and see what they look like.”3

  The new justice minister was plainly delighted with his promotion. In contrast with his indifference at being named Pearson’s parliamentary secretary, Trudeau knew that he had now made the big time. “It’s a wonderful position, a powerful ministry whose decisions have considerable effect on the lives of the citizenry,” he later recalled. “And I had carte blanche.”4 A reporter asked him how he felt after his swearing-in as justice minister. Trudeau replied that it was a good job, but he was “not sure about the prospects.” Everyone present got the joke. Liberal ministers of justice were famous for their high rate of turnover. Asked what he would bring to the justice department, Trudeau replied that he was reluctant to comment on specifics. He mentioned that a review of the Canadian Criminal Code was already under way, which was timely because he held liberal views on divorce, homosexuality, and abortion. (It would take the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops less than two days to produce a formal letter cautioning the government against liberalizing Canada’s abortion law.)5 Trudeau added that he thought there was also room for reform of administrative tribunals, contempt-of-court cases, and other legal mechanisms.