A second and equally controversial reform contemplated by Trudeau’s omnibus bill concerned homosexuality—in 1967 still classified as a pathological disease by the American Psychiatric Association and still punishable in Canada by life in prison. Seeking once again to separate the sacred from the profane, Trudeau proposed to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, knowing, of course, that many Canadians (including members of his own caucus) believed that such acts were unnatural.
Trudeau’s task was eased by Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the United States and the 1957 Wolfenden Report in the United Kingdom, both of which rejected the traditional idea of homosexuality as pathological.24 But what clinched Trudeau’s case for decriminalization above all was the timely story of Everett George Klippert. Klippert, a thirty-eight-year-old gay man living in Pine Point, N.W.T., had been charged with “gross indecency” in 1965 for the crime of having sex with other gay men. He pleaded guilty. Two psychiatrists testified during Klippert’s trial that his liaisons had been consensual, non-violent, and limited strictly to adults. He was nonetheless convicted and sentenced to “detention for an indeterminate period” as a “dangerous criminal offender” under section 659(b) of the Criminal Code.25 On November 7, 1967, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed Klippert’s appeal in a three-to-two split decision, affirming that he was indeed a dangerous offender. Chief Justice John R. Cartwright and Justice Emmett Hall dissented. They argued that “however loathsome” Klippert’s behaviour might have been, he was patently not in the class of offenders “whose failure to control their sexual impulses renders them a source of danger.” Cartwright added for good measure that he thought it was “improbable” that Parliament meant to imprison all homosexuals for life.26
Many straight Canadians were troubled by the Supreme Court ruling, their ambivalence about homosexuality notwithstanding. In an editorial entitled “A Return to the Middle Ages,” the Toronto Star attacked the proposition that a gay man who had never committed a violent offence should be imprisoned for life. “Homosexuality is a practice intensely repulsive to normal people,” said the Star. “But there is a growing doubt whether it is wise to treat homosexual acts between consenting adults as a crime.”27 The Globe and Mail observed that it was “strange to the point of being unbelievable that conduct in Britain which would not even bring a criminal charge can, in Canada, send a man to prison for life.”28 Toronto psychologist Stephen Neiger reported that “homosexuals are already a frightened group. This will make things even worse for them.”29 To his enduring credit, NDP leader Tommy Douglas protested the injustice of the Supreme Court ruling in the House of Commons. Since homosexuality was now understood to be “a social and psychiatric problem rather than a criminal one,” said Douglas, the prime minister should move quickly to remedy the injustice.30
Pierre Trudeau did not have to be convinced. Two days after the Supreme Court ruling on the Klippert case, he stated that he favoured something “along the same lines” as recent British reforms that had decriminalized homosexual acts.31 Rejecting suggestions that he strike some sort of commission to study the question, Trudeau instead acted decisively. When he tabled his revisions to the Criminal Code, they included an amendment permitting “acts done in private between husband and wife or any two persons, each of whom is 21 years or more of age, both of whom consent to the commission of the act.”
Trudeau was also decisive in his defence of such reforms. “We decided to go for broke on this one,” he told a press scrum after tabling his omnibus bill. “I feel that it has knocked down a lot of totems and overridden a lot of taboos. Take this thing on homosexuality. I think that the view we take here is that there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. And I think that what’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.”32 Pressed to defend his nonchalance about homosexuality, Trudeau was brash, then and later. “There are people saying queers will be able to pick up little boys on the street if the bill is passed,” said Trudeau. “The people who say that are pretty stupid.”33 A reporter asked him slyly, “Do you expect to run into any personal roadblocks in the House over the homosexuality provisions?” Trudeau broke into howls of laughter. “I have had many homosexual friends in my life in both the artistic and intellectual communities,” he liked to say. “But I was never one myself.”34
Gay Canadians and their professional advocates were delighted with Trudeau’s proposed amendment. “It will take a great deal of pressure, fear and anxiety from homosexuals,” observed Dr. R.E. Turner, director of the forensic clinic at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. “I think this is a considerable step, with more to go.”35 An unnamed thirty-year-old lesbian spoke candidly to the press. “I think it’s good to know that it’s finally legal,” she said. “I mean, everybody’s been doing it. It would be very nice to be able to hold hands in public if you wanted to. It would be nice to be able to get married legally (homosexually) if you wanted to. But I don’t think we’ll ever make the grade there. You can’t win them all.”36 A thirty-five-year-old gay man gave his view. “I want the right to live and be accepted as a homosexual,” he asserted. “I want to be judged by my worth as an individual. If I’m dishonest, immoral or indecent, then reject me for these reasons—not because of my homosexuality. We homosexuals are here to stay.”37
The public impact of Trudeau’s omnibus bill was immense. Detailed analyses of his proposed changes to the Criminal Code dominated the nation’s newspapers for days as Canadians tried to determine just how much of the imperious and prudish Canada of old might be jettisoned. “The Criminal Code amendments proposed by Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau amount to a radical redefinition of the state’s attitude toward private conduct,” gushed the Toronto Star. “Trudeau is the boldest reformer of them all.”38 The Montreal Star agreed. “The whole tenor of the amendments reflects the civilized humanity which has, since the appointment of Mr. Trudeau, characterized the government’s overall attitude to the law,” it affirmed.39 Trudeau was singled out yet again for his sharp intellect, his “gutsiness,” and his high-minded aversion to hypocrisy. “Anyone who saw it at first hand or on television could hardly fail to be impressed with the lucidity of the minister’s explanations and the obvious quality of the thinking that went into them,” wrote Globe and Mail columnist George Bain.40
Trudeau’s legislative triumphs enhanced his reputation in more subtle ways as well. As a rookie MP, he had been dogged by speculation that he was a dilettante or just plain lazy, but now Trudeau’s work ethic was above reproach. He had spent most of Canada’s Centennial Year working fourteen hours a day on the divorce bill, the omnibus bill, and the Constitution, and everyone in Ottawa knew it. A related revelation was that Trudeau turned out to be both a good listener and a valued collaborator. “When the omnibus bill was being prepared he held a series of study groups with the members over many weeks,” Liberal MP Robert Stanbury later explained. “Once a week we’d go over parts of the amending bill in the areas where there was a lot of controversy, such as firearms, abortion, lotteries, and gross indecency. When he evolves an opinion he states it vigorously and defends it vigorously. But I found him open to change if you can convince him. Once he’s developed an opinion he challenges you to convince him.”41 This willingness to listen had always been Trudeau’s modus operandi, wrote his friend Gérard Pelletier. “Trudeau can display enormous patience with those who discuss in good faith and he is not oblivious of the concrete consequences, whenever he puts forward a new idea.”42 Such testimonials served to humanize Trudeau, leavening his reputation as a cold and aloof intellectual.
Trudeau’s original plan for his Criminal Code amendments was to pilot them through the House of Commons after the Christmas recess and into law by February 1968. It did not happen. The omnibus bill would die on the Order Paper, only to be resurrected as Bill C-150 and passed in the spring of 1969, after Trudeau had become prime minister.
What did happen was as unscripted as it was unprecedented. Pierre
Trudeau’s fortitude, inspired leadership, and straight talk on matters that touched the private lives of all citizens vaulted him into the political stratosphere. His simple, quotable aphorisms—We must avoid mixing the sacred and the profane, The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation—spoke directly to those Canadians, likely the majority, for whom the sixties ethos of personal and political liberation was apposite, but never as an invitation to radicalism.43 Then as now, Canadians understood that yoking the tools of democracy to the cause of social change took more grit than chanting revolutionary slogans or turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
In an era when the formal political process was hobbled by incessant partisan squabbling and dithering obfuscation, Canada’s clear-eyed justice minister had pushed the envelope—not nearly as far as some Canadians might have liked but “as far as we dared,” as he put it himself. In doing so, he acquired a powerful new aura, captured in the slogan that would thereafter characterize his rise to power. Pierre Trudeau is a man for tomorrow.
At 10 a.m. on December 14, 1967—the first day of the formal parliamentary debate on Trudeau’s divorce bill—Prime Minister Pearson told his caucus colleagues that he had decided to retire. “It was a dramatic moment, followed by gasps of surprise and attempts to begin a discussion,” Pearson himself later recalled. “I cut this short by telling the Cabinet that this was settled, and that there was no point in anyone saying anything at all. I was going out to meet the press immediately.”44
Verdun MP Bryce Mackasey exited the caucus meeting with tears streaming down his face, but no one else seemed particularly surprised. Pearson had turned seventy the previous April. Over the course of four general elections, he had failed to restore his “natural-governing” Liberal Party to majority status, despite Canada’s enviable track record of economic growth and low unemployment.45 As Pearson well knew, whispers about his possible successors had turned into feverish speculation after the lacklustre campaign of 1965. Since then, perspicacious journalists had been tracking the clandestine organization-building and stealthy infighting of Liberal leadership hopefuls—Mitchell Sharp, Paul Hellyer, and Paul Martin foremost among them.46 The prime minister had won a reprieve in September 1967 when the Liberal caucus supported a “draft Pearson” motion to deal with the mounting national-unity crisis. Yet now, with René Lévesque’s Mouvement souveraineté-association rallying the separatist cause in Quebec, the constitutional emergency appeared to be escalating. As veteran Globe and Mail correspondent Anthony Westell fretted, Pearson was exiting politics just as “Canada passes through the severest crisis of 100 years.”47
Pearson was taken aback. He tried to reassure Canadians that he would not be a “lame duck” leader as the country headed into negotiations with Quebec but rather “an elder statesman, above the political fray.” Opposition leaders Robert Stanfield and Tommy Douglas expressed doubts, wondering whether Pearson would not now end up in the role of mere “mediator” of talks with the provinces. Quebec premier Daniel Johnson had reservations of his own. “I wonder if, with the Prime Minister going, the federal government will be ready to commit itself to something specific,” he said.48 Pierre Trudeau, now routinely identified in the press as the “architect of the Bill of Rights plan,” stated wryly that he was as optimistic as ever about the forthcoming constitutional conference.
The prime minister also seemed to underestimate the impact his decision would have on the day-to-day priorities of some of his top ministers. With a leadership convention looming from April 4 to April 6, 1968, and 2,475 delegates to court, the frontrunners knew they had very little time to waste. “Once I had announced my decision to resign,” Pearson later recalled, “the campaigns for the leadership, which had been going on surreptitiously, came out into the open. I was aware of the great change in the devotion of these ministers to their jobs. They could not be out in the country campaigning and at the same time carry on the work they had been appointed to do in their departments.” Pearson also found himself besieged by ministers seeking his advice. “One or two of them almost begged me to tell them what they should do,” he recalled. “I found this rather trying, and it went on for three or four weeks as the various candidates entered the ring.”49
Pearson was canny, of course. He wanted to give the appearance of neutrality on Liberal succession, but he also held strong views about how his party—and Canada—might move forward in light of mounting pressures on national unity. On the day he announced his retirement, he spent most of the time on the phone with party officials, family members, and at least one of his top ministers, Paul Martin, who was then in Brussels attending NATO meetings. He ate his lunch (oysters and whisky) alone and later enjoyed a quiet dinner with his wife.50 Only two of his cabinet colleagues were summoned to 24 Sussex Drive on that historic day for an in-person chat. They were Jean Marchand and Pierre Trudeau.
It was no secret that the prime minister subscribed to the unwritten rule in the Liberal Party that its leadership should alternate between English and French Canadians. In recent months, he had gone even further, telling party members that a French-speaking leader would greatly enhance the federal government’s negotiations with Quebec City—and greatly impede the Tories’ electoral prospects, since they were now led by the unilingual Nova Scotian Robert Stanfield. Among Liberals, and among Canadians more generally, it was widely believed that Jean Marchand was Pearson’s odds-on favourite. Pierre Trudeau, for example, later recalled being entirely blasé about Pearson’s retirement announcement because he thought Marchand the heir apparent. “In my view, the obvious successor, if he was to be a Quebecer, was Jean Marchand,” Trudeau said. “It was he who had dealt with all partisan party matters, it was he who had strong public support in Quebec and the rest of Canada, and it was his candidacy that prominent Liberals were promoting in Toronto and Montreal.”51
Yet Trudeau knew better than anyone that Marchand did not want the job. The two friends had for months been quietly discussing the Liberal leadership with Gérard Pelletier and like-minded ministers, including Edgar Benson, Larry Pennell, and Walter Gordon. “My name was being put forward,” Marchand said later of these conversations, “and I always disagreed.”52 He was not in the best of health, Marchand had to remind his comrades. He also believed that he was too little known to Canadians outside Quebec and not nearly fluent enough in English.
What, exactly, Pearson, Marchand, and Trudeau discussed the evening of December 14, 1967, was therefore significant for the future of the party and the country. (Lester Pearson’s memoir is light on specifics, affirming only that the prime minister hoped at least one of the wise men would allow his name to stand.) Jean Marchand later recalled that date—the first day of the divorce bill debate—as the point he realized that Trudeau was the party’s best hope. “From that moment on,” Marchand later recalled, “I said, ‘Pierre, I think you will have to change your mind.’”53 By all accounts, Trudeau was genuinely stunned. He had laboured in Marchand’s shadow for so long that even his closest friends had not given a Trudeau candidacy the slightest consideration. Trudeau began immediately to stonewall Marchand. “I don’t know this party,” he told his friend, “and they don’t know me. I just entered in ʼ65. Let me work with it another five or ten years, and then I will have built my power bases, and I’ll have learned something about politics and the House of Commons and the party and everything else. And then I’ll do it.”54
And that is how the situation was left when Marchand and Trudeau departed 24 Sussex Drive together. Both men agreed with Pearson that there should be a strong Quebec presence in the Liberal leadership race, but each thought the other better suited to the job. The only certainty was that they would not run against each other.
Ramsay Cook was another friend who believed that Trudeau could lead the Liberal Party to victory.
Starting in the summer of 1967, the young historian took it upon himself to boost Trudeau’s profile in English Canada and also to popularize his ideas about Canadian federali
sm. On August 3, Cook wrote a feature op-ed for the Globe and Mail endorsing Trudeau’s position on the Constitution. “The trouble with Trudeau,” wrote Cook sardonically, “is that he states his mind clearly. He believes, in effect, that if the federal government treats Quebec as a distinct nation within Canada, Quebec will ultimately become a distinct nation outside of Canada. Consequently Mr. Trudeau favors a federalism that provides equal status for French Canadians and equal status for all provinces.”55 Several weeks later, Cook persuaded his neighbour, John Gray, president of the publisher Macmillan Canada, to bring out an English-language edition of Le Fédéralisme et la société canadienne-française, a collection of Trudeau’s Cité libre essays. Prominent York University historian John T. Saywell was enlisted to write an introduction to the book in the hope that it would enhance Trudeau’s name recognition in English Canada. But by the time Federalism and the French Canadians appeared in bookstores early in 1968, the justice minister’s fame far exceeded both Saywell’s and Cook’s. The book became an instant bestseller.
Significantly, the French-language edition had already made waves in English Canada. All of the major dailies had received review copies of the book in October 1967. Some, including the Globe and Mail, ran front-page stories setting out Trudeau’s federalist ideas and reacquainting readers with his Cité libre past.56 Others, including the Toronto Star, ran editorials congratulating the justice minister on the “impeccable logic” of his case against special status for Quebec.57 Trudeau held a press conference in Montreal on October 16 to launch his book, where he spoke openly about his vision for a bilingual Canada. “What I am thinking of is a bill of rights which will guarantee French rights across the country,” he told the crowd. “If you say the government of Quebec alone represents French-Canadian aspirations, if you say that to start with, it is clear that my formula won’t work. My formula tries to preserve Canadian unity.”58 For Canadians who might have found Trudeau’s dense academic prose challenging to read, there was an elegant simplicity to this three-sentence précis of his federalist “formula.”
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