Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  In English Canada, Pearson’s cabinet shuffle was widely seen as a much-needed infusion of youth into the Liberal ranks. The Toronto Star called the newcomers “men of ideas and vigor.”6 The Calgary Herald agreed, expressing the hope that they would “help to shift the political outlook in Quebec from its narrow, separatist bent.”7 Peter C. Newman observed that the “big winner” was Canadian federalism. “By promoting Pierre-Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, the Liberal party’s most articulate and impassioned French advocates of federalism,” wrote Newman, “Lester Pearson appears to be abandoning his longtime policy of non-confrontation with Quebec.”8 The Montreal Gazette praised the prime minister for putting Trudeau’s “rigorous intellect to good use.”9 Globe and Mail columnist Dennis Braithwaite caught an early glimpse of the emerging Trudeau mystique, noting that the new justice minister was “the closest thing to a Kennedy image in Canadian politics. Trudeau is handsome, he has the well-known Gallic voltage, he is cool, intelligent, amused, articulate; and he speaks English with scarcely a trace of accent.”10

  Opposition leader John Diefenbaker congratulated Trudeau on his promotion. “I like to see young men finding their way on Parliament Hill,” he said.11 The day after the swearing in, Diefenbaker took Trudeau to task in Question Period, as everyone knew he would.

  Would the new minister “give early consideration to the convening of a national constitutional conference?” asked the Tory leader.

  “I want to thank the Leader of the Opposition particularly for starting off gently by asking me a difficult question,” Trudeau replied. “On the issue itself, I must say that I have not been in Cabinet long enough yet to change my mind.” This riposte provoked a round of laughter in the House. Assuming a more serious tone, Trudeau asserted that because there was no consensus in Canada on how best to approach the Constitution, he thought the country was not yet ready for such a conference. “I feel that precisely because we have avoided such confrontations,” said Trudeau, “we are permitting responsible politicians everywhere to arrive at the conclusion which we on this side of the house have reached, namely that time is on our side.”12

  In Quebec’s French-language press, the headline story following the cabinet shuffle was not Trudeau’s move to justice but Pearson’s inspired decision to name Roland Michener Canada’s governor general. Editorial commentary on Trudeau was perfunctory. Le Droit and L’Action ran headlines quoting John Diefenbaker’s quip that Trudeau was his “âme soeur” (soulmate) because he opposed the theory of deux nations.13 An unusually combative Claude Ryan, whose worries about Trudeau’s influence on the prime minister had been mounting since the Liberal convention the previous spring, accused the English-language press of grossly misunderstanding Quebec and thus of always looking for a “messiah.” “The latest candidates,” Ryan complained in Le Devoir, “are naturally Mr. Jean Marchand and Mr. Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”14 The Globe and Mail responded immediately to Ryan’s rancour. “It’s depressing that English-Canadian pleasure over the emergence of these men on the national stage should draw dour lectures from Quebec. Please allow us to be pleased, Mr. Ryan. There’s little enough to cheer about in Quebec-Ottawa relations these days.”15

  Such faint appeals from English Canada did little to influence elite opinion in Quebec, of course. This was because—as Globe and Mail columnist George Bain put it so poignantly—“Mr. Trudeau is endlessly on record as rejecting separatism or special status.”16 Before the end of his first month as justice minister, Trudeau was widely credited with having united his nationalist adversaries in Quebec. They included party leaders Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson, and also press luminaries like Ryan, Jean-Marc Léger of Le Devoir, and Marcel Gingras of Le Droit. Trudeau’s intellectual opposition to deux nations had for years made him the bête noire of Quebec nationalists. But now that he was federal justice minister, the stakes were incomparably higher. If Quebec’s national character was not accommodated in some new constitutional arrangement, the nationalists were signalling, Canada would not survive. “Mr. Marchand, Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Chretien, our great hopes of yesterday, will certainly have to readjust their aim and take the aspirations of the Quebec people into account,” asserted Sylvio St.-Amant of Le Nouvelliste. “Otherwise they will be contributing to the completion of separatism in Quebec.”17

  The irony was not lost on Trudeau. Indeed, he had anticipated it. The closer he came to power, the more he was accused of instigating the precise catastrophe he had gone to Ottawa to prevent.

  Despite Trudeau’s dogged aversion to tinkering with the Constitution, events over the course of Canada’s ebullient Centennial Year overtook him.

  The Liberal government of Jean Lesage was defeated in the Quebec election of June 1966. The new premier, Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson, assumed power promising to make Quebec “a true national state” within Canada. Johnson believed that if Quebec’s particular needs could not be accommodated by a reformed Confederation deal, a new Canadian Constitution should be drafted from scratch. He thus announced that his government would continue the work of Lesage’s two constitutional committees—one a bipartisan legislative committee and the other a group of academics. By January 1967, the academic committee was rumoured to have produced a five-thousand-page report for the government of Quebec.18

  Not wanting to be caught flat-footed, Lester Pearson followed Johnson’s lead. In January 1967, he quietly created what McGill law professor Edward McWhinney called a “task force on Confederation.”19 The new group was headed by Pierre Trudeau, still serving as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary, and managed by Jean Beetz, head of the provincial-relations secretariat in the Privy Council Office. On May 10, 1967, one month after Trudeau was appointed justice minister, Pearson announced in the House that this task force would now be enlarged and run by the justice department. It was rechristened the Steering Committee on Constitutional Questions. Trudeau and Beetz remained in charge.

  One person who understood immediately what it meant to place Pierre Trudeau in charge of constitutional reform was federal NDP leader Tommy Douglas. The day after Pearson announced the creation of the new steering committee, Douglas tabled a non-confidence motion in Parliament criticizing the Liberal government for failing to provide special status for Quebec.20 The motion was defeated easily. Diefenbaker’s Tories wanted nothing to do with the NDP’s deux nations approach to Quebec and voted with the Liberals. Undaunted, Douglas chastised Trudeau for refusing to adapt. “The Government no longer talks about patriating the constitution or bringing it up to date,” said Douglas. “The Minister of Justice now wants to embalm the constitution, to put a little rouge on it and dress it up. But it will still be dead.”21

  In one respect, Douglas was correct—and it bears underscoring. Between January and September 1967, the prime minister tasked Trudeau with coordinating revisions to the Canadian Constitution—revisions that Trudeau believed were both unnecessary and dangerous. As a legal scholar, he had maintained this position since the mid-1950s, and it demonstrated his remarkable capacity for compartmentalization. In cautioning Canadians against precipitous action on the Constitution, Trudeau was not being coy. “My students are always yelling for an immediate rewriting of the Constitution,” Trudeau had said during the 1965 election campaign. “But they are yelling against a dragon after his fire has gone out. It is not necessary to grab for more powers. What is necessary is to tell the politicians, ‘You already have enough—do a job with them.’”22 Two years later, he spoke philosophically about the fragility of Canadian federalism. “I feel there are a number of people who are being reckless with the constitution,” he said. “I don’t think people realize what a delicate mechanism the federal system is. It’s not difficult at all to break up the country. Not only Quebec can do it but at least three or four provinces can.”23

  Yet Trudeau remained pugnacious when it came to his adversaries in Quebec. In late May 1967, Trudeau announced the appointment of two English-Canadian jurists—lawyer and labour mediator H.
Carl Goldenberg and Professor Ivan L. Head—as his top advisers on the Canadian Constitution.24 Asked by the press how he would respond to protests from Quebec that he had not appointed a Quebecer, Trudeau replied with a “terse obscenity” in French. Asked in the House whether the appointments would be followed by a white paper, Trudeau dismissed the idea out of hand. “I do not think it would be necessary or proper to debate the subject in question,” he said.25

  One of the reasons Canadians seemed willing to reimagine Confederation was that they were by the summer of 1967 intoxicated by the country’s centennial celebrations. As Pierre Berton recalled in his book 1967: The Last Good Year, Canadians young and old were dreaming of limitless possibility and—uniquely in Canadian history—displaying exuberant national pride.

  Never before, in peacetime at least, had patriotism been so visible, so pervasive, and so thoroughly conjoined with the Canadian state. Centennial stamps were issued, coins minted, parks and pools built or renamed, songs commissioned and sung unabashedly, histories written, films produced, and countless parades and festivals attended. Ironically, perhaps, given the simultaneous surge of French-Canadian nationalism, the crowning achievement of this outburst of national euphoria was Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal between April and October. When Tommy Douglas, normally an unsentimental political scrapper, tried to force the Pearson Liberals into amending the Constitution, he did so invoking the spirit of Canada’s centennial. And when Pierre Trudeau’s supporters defended his constitutional views against such initiatives, they did the same thing. “Let’s confess: it’s great to be Canadians,” cheered the Toronto Star on July 1, 1967. “As Justice Minister Pierre-Elliot Trudeau noted the other day, we Canadians under a century-old constitution still enjoy domestic peace and liberty equaled by few other nations.”26

  It was no coincidence that the first bona fide instance of Trudeaumania took place in early July 1967 under the influence of this giddy centennial euphoria.

  Lester Pearson had known by January 1967 at the latest that he could not postpone indefinitely the thankless job of reforming the Constitution. That was the month Ontario premier John Robarts announced that he would host a premiers’ constitutional conference within the year. Pearson knew that he would have to get out in front of the premiers on the constitutional issue, and on July 5 an opportunity presented itself. Queen Elizabeth was visiting Ottawa as part of the city’s centennial celebration, and nine of the premiers were in attendance (the only absentee being Premier Robert Stanfield of Nova Scotia, who could not attend due to the death of his brother). Pearson took full advantage. He met privately with the premiers that afternoon and invited them to a federal-provincial constitutional conference to be hosted by the feds in early 1968. In a convoluted three-paragraph communiqué issued after the meeting, the prime minister specified that a discussion of a bill of rights, “while in no way preventing a review of other constitutional matters as might later be required, would provide the opportunity to begin an examination of the constitution in relation to the fundamental rights and freedoms that should form the basis of Canadian federalism.”27

  At long last, after years of foot-dragging, the prime minister had agreed to host the constitutional conference that Quebec had been demanding since 1962. Moreover, he had paired his invitation to the premiers with a powerful assertion of Pierre Trudeau’s signature idea, namely that the language rights of French Canadians should be protected everywhere in Canada by a constitutionally guaranteed bill of rights.

  This announcement should have rocked the country. But almost no one noticed.

  Instead, what dominated Canadian headlines that balmy July day was a brouhaha over the wardrobe of the justice minister. Pierre Elliott Trudeau had had the impudence—in this era when all men dressed in identical dark suits, white shirts, and plain ties—to wear a yellow-and-red-dotted ascot into the House of Commons!

  During question period, in the midst of a tedious exchange over Trudeau’s intention to pension out a disgraced judge, the straight-laced, grey-flannel Diefenbaker simply could not help himself. “The honourable gentleman,” Diefenbaker admonished Trudeau, “should be more considerate of the House, dressed most improperly as he is.”28 With Pearson tucked away among the premiers, it fell to acting prime minister Paul Martin to respond. “I am sure you will agree with me,” Martin told the Speaker, “that it is not within the rules of the House for one member to comment on the dress of another member.”29 Diefenbaker would not be silenced. “The proprieties of parliament are to be upheld even by the Minister of Justice,” he snorted.30

  The entire exchange took less than a minute. Yet it vaulted images of the ascot-wearing minister of justice onto the nation’s front pages, inflated the question of parliamentary decorum into a national debate, and became a defining moment in the evolution of Trudeau’s public persona as a sartorial renegade. True to form, Trudeau was nonchalant about the matter. “People are more interested in ideas than dress,” he said afterwards.31 When a journalist needled him about the incident, Trudeau took the bait. “If you have the address of a good tailor will you please send it to me?” Trudeau asked. “I don’t think I’d like your tailor,” the reporter sniffed back.32

  George Bain at the Globe and Mail noted sardonically that an important milestone had been passed in Canadian democracy—and he was not referring to Pearson’s proposed constitutional conference. “July 5, 1967, is a day worth remembering. July 5 is the day that Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Minister of Justice, broke the haberdashery barrier (as we shall always remember the occurrence). So off with the collar and tie. Down with blue and grey. Never more the feet encased in restrictive oxfords. Away convention. Freedom—that’s the cry.”33 The Toronto Star noted that Trudeau stood in good company with the likes of Victorian British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, a dandy who once showed up in the Commons with lavender trousers, a green coat, and a purple cravat.34 Questions were raised as to whether Trudeau’s fashions had been purchased for him by a woman. “No” was Trudeau’s response to this suggestion. “I’m afraid I’m responsible for all my clothes. I can’t recall any woman ever giving me anything to wear.”35

  The day after the ascot incident, Trudeau arrived at the House in a traditional suit and tie, but this time with open-toed sandals. Reporters asked the prime minister whether his justice minister was under orders to wear the tie. “I don’t give Mr. Trudeau orders about what to wear,” replied Pearson. “Mr. Trudeau always looks in order.”36 The press dutifully sought out the opinions of stylish female MPs. “Very fetching,” said Margaret Rideout, Liberal MP for Westmorland. “Mr. Trudeau would lose something that is refreshingly individual if he couldn’t be himself and dress as he pleases.”37 Grace MacInnis, NDP member for Vancouver−Kingsway, added her view. “There should be as much leeway in men’s fashions as in women’s. Mr. Trudeau has always dressed informally. He wore his Ascot tie when he was just a member of the House and no one raised any objection.”38 Jean Casselman Wadds, Conservative member for Grenville−Dundas, played the contrarian. “I personally don’t like a holiday sort of garb in the House,” she said. “It wouldn’t be allowed in many public dining rooms. If a man wears informal clothes to work, what does he wear to relax in?”39

  By 1967’s summer of love, of course, clothing had emerged as a key marker of generational difference in North America—along with music, hairstyle, slang, and inebriants. The public record is silent as to whether John Diefenbaker thought Pierre Trudeau was on the slippery slope towards hippiedom, but he had certainly got his point across. Later that year, as if to affirm that the times were indeed a-changin’, the Globe and Mail awarded Pierre Trudeau the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Award for the best-dressed man in the House of Commons, as selected by John Diefenbaker.

  The morning of July 23, 1967, French president Charles de Gaulle, then seventy-six years old, stepped off the French cruiser Colbert and onto the federal docks at Quebec City. There, to the cheers of hundreds of ordinary Quebecers and a noisy c
ontingent of RIN supporters, the général commenced an official five-day visit to Canada that had been on the books for months.

  The Canadian prime minister was apprehensive about the visit, and for good reason. No one knew better than the ex-diplomat Pearson that the optics of state visits mattered more than the substantive talks. Yet even before de Gaulle had set foot on Canadian soil, Pearson knew that the feds had lost control of the choreography. The Quebec government had boldly usurped Ottawa’s prerogative to plan de Gaulle’s itinerary, and Pearson, rather than making a scene about it, acquiesced. This meant that de Gaulle would visit Quebec City and Montreal before Ottawa—a true diplomatic coup for a provincial government more insistent than ever that Quebec was “a nation within a nation.”

  Seen from the perspective of Canadian federalism, de Gaulle’s visit was literally a wreck on a wreck. It started with the général’s official speech at a banquet at the Château Frontenac hotel on the evening of July 23. Federal ministers (and Montrealers) Paul Martin and Jean Marchand attended the banquet, but neither was seated at the head table. “What we are witnessing here,” de Gaulle said solemnly of Quebecers, “is the advent of a people which wishes, in every field, to determine its own future and take its destiny in its own hands. France salutes this accession with all her soul.”40 Quebec nationalists were delighted with such a vote of confidence, of course, but as the Toronto Star noted tersely, de Gaulle’s “brinksmanship” had put Canadians “on edge.”41