In November 1967, Ramsay Cook met privately with Marc Lalonde in Toronto. Lalonde asked Cook what he thought about a Trudeau leadership bid. Cook loved the idea. He had long since abandoned the NDP and its deux nations policy in favour of Trudeau’s federalist program. Cook agreed to discreetly promote the idea of a Trudeau candidacy among his academic friends.
With Lester Pearson’s retirement announcement in mid-December, this nascent “draft Trudeau” movement went public. Just as Trudeau was riding the crest of his popularity as the author of the omnibus bill, Cook and his friends Mashel and Ethel Teitelbaum published an open letter to the justice minister. “A group of friends involved with the universities, the media, the arts and politics (in that order) would like to see you stand for the nomination this spring,” the letter read. “We feel that you are the most talented candidate the Liberal Party can offer. As well, we feel that you personally may offer the best chance of a French-English rapprochement. In fact, yours is a Liberal candidacy that we could actively, enthusiastically support in the coming election. Therefore, we would like, with this letter, to extend our active support should you consider taking up the challenge.”59 Within days, the “Toronto Committee for Trudeau,” as Cook’s small band of artists and intellectuals became known, had also published a petition containing the signatures of six hundred Trudeau supporters.
Peter C. Newman would later suggest that academics rallied to Trudeau because they knew his work in Cité libre and thought of him as “one of their own.”60 Yet as Newman well knew, professors seldom agree on anything, least of all anything political. Significantly, these young university faculty members mobilized early behind Trudeau because they appreciated his ideas about Canadian federalism, which derived not from short-term political expediency but from decades of study and analysis. Trudeau’s politique fonctionnelle and especially his reasoned anti-nationalism seemed to strike exactly the right chord in the turbulent sixties. As veteran University of Toronto historian Michael Bliss has recalled in his recent memoir, both Canada and Quebec seemed at that time to be awash in “ethnic nationalism, a kind of neo-tribalism that had ugly overtones.” Bliss, who spent much of 1967 at Harvard University watching “the gathering crisis in American life,” returned to Toronto as a new hire in the University of Toronto history department. He was ecstatic to find that a smart French-Canadian federalist had a concrete plan for averting a national-unity crisis. “It was astonishing to hear of the rise of the dark-horse minister of justice, the urbane intellectual, Pierre Trudeau, and also to hear of the role that Ramsay Cook had in furthering Trudeau’s campaign among intellectuals in English Canada,” Bliss writes. “Here was the historian engaging in the best kind of political activism on behalf of the best kind of candidate.”61
Outside the hallowed halls of academe, the idea that a few Canadian eggheads might elevate one of their own into the prime minister’s office seemed ludicrous. Frank Jones at the Toronto Star called Ramsay Cook and his friends “the most ineffective bunch of political rooters a candidate ever had. To start with, most of its members vote for another party—the NDP. Secondly, none of its members so far as is known are delegates to the leadership convention. And if that isn’t enough, committee members admit their endorsement may be the kiss of death to a Trudeau who has to convince delegates he is a practical politician and not just a woolly academic.”62 Ramsay Cook certainly understood the optics. “The delegates may feel they can’t trust the judgment of a bunch of ivory tower professors,” he told Jones. But Trudeau had come up with an eminently practical plan for Canadian federalism, and Canadians would do well to consider it for themselves. “He is an extremely intelligent man with a sense of the central Canadian problems, the French and English question and the relationship between the federal and provincial governments,” Cook affirmed.63
Veteran Globe and Mail correspondent George Bain pondered the virtues of the historians’ candidate in twin columns published on December 27 and 28, 1967. “At the moment, old and skilled hands in the Liberal Party are inclined to hoot at the idea that Mr. Trudeau could be elected leader,” Bain conceded in the first piece. But the fact that Canadian intellectuals were flocking to the justice minister might suggest to the party’s “pros” that he had “the style to capture popular imagination.”64 By the end of his second column, Bain appeared to have convinced himself that Trudeau really was the Liberal heir apparent. “The one man who seems capable of catching on between now and April 4 in a way to break the race open is Mr. Trudeau,” Bain concluded. “He has impressive qualifications—teacher of constitutional law, political economist, polemical journalist, late-come but fast-rising politician. Old enough at 47 not to alarm the senior element in the party, and young enough, in appearance and thought, to satisfy the youth movement.”65
Reporting from the trenches of the draft-Trudeau movement, Peter C. Newman noted astutely that most of the presumed successors to Lester Pearson—Martin, Sharp, Hellyer, Robert Winters—came from within the party machine, where original ideas counted for very little. Far more important to establishment Liberals was nurturing the alliance between the country’s political and business elites.66 This fact alone made Trudeau a different sort of candidate. “During his brief but exciting tenure in the justice portfolio Trudeau has established himself as a child of his times,” wrote Newman. “His candor, his intellectual curiosity, his astute use of the media, his championing of social reforms have suddenly thrust him into inevitable contention.”67 Pierre Berton, the popular broadcaster and author, agreed. “Trudeau is the guy who really excites me,” he told Newman. “What we need is a guy with ideas so fresh and so different, that he is going to be able to view the country from a different point of view.”68
Twenty-nine-year-old Toronto Star reporter Alastair Dow agreed that Trudeau’s reputation as a bohemian made him the obvious anti-establishment candidate. “There’s a sophomore MP who tools around Ottawa in an expensive Mercedes sports model, who is said to date some of Canada’s most beautiful women, who is a French-Canadian graduate of Harvard and the London School of Economics, and who this week proposed to rip layers of Victorian prudery off Canada’s Criminal Code,” wrote Dow. “And what’s more, people are saying this swinging bachelor who wears zippy (for the Commons) attire and who affects what can best be described as a receding, early-Beatles haircut should be the prime minister of Canada.”69
Much of this feverish speculation took place during the “Christmas party season,” as Ramsay Cook later put it, and was wasted on Trudeau himself. With Parliament in recess, Canada’s swinging justice minister had quietly flown off to Tahiti to skin-dive and—as fate would have it—to flirt with a beautiful young woman named Margaret Sinclair.
While the tweed-jacket set was mobilizing on behalf of the absent and still-very-much-undecided Pierre Trudeau, a group of his friends in the Liberal Party began plotting in secret to build him a campaign organization. Again Marc Lalonde played the leading role, working alongside Toronto Liberal MPs James Walker, Robert Stanbury, and Donald Macdonald to broaden Trudeau’s appeal to party insiders. Lalonde hosted a meeting of Trudeau loyalists on December 15, 1967—the day after Pearson announced his retirement. The group included Michael Pitfield, Pierre Levasseur, Jean-Pierre Goyer, and André Ouellet. Two other young and enthusiastic Trudeau acolytes, Gordon Gibson and Eddie Rubin, acting on their own initiative and using their own money, had by then acquired office space in Ottawa to anchor the still-undeclared Trudeau campaign. Jim Davey, a trained physicist and market researcher, agreed to manage the shop.70
Marc Lalonde knew his friend only too well. If Trudeau got wind of these clandestine operations to mount a candidacy to which he had not yet agreed, he might well say forget it. “I remember him going to Tahiti over Christmas, 1967,” Lalonde later admitted. “He left us with no indication that he was interested at all. If anything, the indication was no, he was not interested. He really felt that Marchand was the guy who should run, that he owed it to Marchand to rule himself
out.”71 With the draft-Trudeau movement gaining momentum and a campaign organization up and running, Lalonde knew he had to act. He cabled Trudeau in Tahiti and asked him not to talk to the press. It was a ruse, designed as much to keep Trudeau in the dark as to plug leaks in Ottawa. As usual, Trudeau’s aides and friends had dissembled about his whereabouts to protect his privacy. The media knew only that he was “somewhere in the South Pacific.”72
On Sunday, January 14, Trudeau returned from Tahiti to Montreal. Tanned and fit, he caught up with Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier over lunch at Café Martin on boulevard Saint-Laurent. Much had happened while he had been away, they told him. Quebec Liberal Federation president Eric Kierans had become the first declared leadership candidate on January 10, followed the next day by federal defence minister Paul Hellyer. The Nova Scotia Liberal Association was holding its policy conference in Halifax that very weekend. There the federal minister of labour (and native Nova Scotian) Allan MacEachen had announced his candidacy. Several other leadership hopefuls, including Mitchell Sharp and Paul Martin, had given campaign-style speeches. When the conversation rolled around to the critical question of placing a Quebecer in the leadership race, Trudeau discovered that little had changed since he and Marchand had met at 24 Sussex Drive exactly one month earlier.
“Pierre, you have to run,” said Marchand.
“My God, Jean, are you serious?” Trudeau replied.
The good-humoured Marchand would later remark that Trudeau was so shocked by this turn in the conversation that he never did finish his lunch. Trudeau listened dutifully to Marchand’s remonstrations against allowing his own name to stand, which he had heard many times before. He pondered his own options. “If you won’t run,” Trudeau finally told Marchand, “then I’ll consider it at least. But in Quebec wouldn’t I be a catastrophe?”73
It was the right question. And as Pelletier and Marchand knew, the news from Quebec was good. Trudeau’s star had been rising in Quebec Liberal circles since the Canadian Bar Association debacle the previous September. With Lester Pearson’s decisive move in cabinet to support Trudeau’s bill of rights, the minister of justice now spoke for the government whenever he discussed constitutional reform with party officials. The more Quebec Liberals got to know Trudeau, the more impressed they were with both the clarity of his ideas and his willingness to work within the party organization.74 Like many other Canadians, they had also come to appreciate his parliamentary skills, never more on display than in December 1967. Following Trudeau’s success with the divorce and omnibus bills, even the Quebec press had begun to give the justice minister favourable coverage.75 It was common knowledge that Jean Marchand would enjoy enormous support in Quebec if he contested the Liberal leadership race. But as word spread that he felt he was not up to the job, Trudeau got the benefit of his long association with the popular labour leader. The Liberal tradition of alternating French and English leaders, coupled with Marchand’s ability to rally the Quebec caucus behind Trudeau, presented formidable advantages should he enter the leadership race.
Just how formidable came to light mere hours after Trudeau’s lunch with Pelletier and Marchand. Trudeau agreed to meet with John Turner, the federal consumer and corporate affairs minister and another as-yet-undeclared leadership hopeful. Though Turner was a bilingual Montrealer and a member of the Quebec caucus, he was not a French Canadian. He thus had an insider’s appreciation of the fact that most Quebec Liberals were waiting for Marchand and Trudeau to figure out what they were doing.76 Trudeau told Turner that he had not yet decided whether he would run. Marchand told Turner the same thing at a private meeting the next day.
On January 16, citing unnamed “informants,” the Globe and Mail announced that Marchand and Trudeau had struck an agreement not to back any of the English-Canadian candidates in the Liberal race.77 The news came as a shock to John Turner, who knew that time was not on his side. With the Western Liberal Policy Conference scheduled for Winnipeg over the following weekend, Turner announced on January 17 that he would join the Liberal leadership race. He thus became the fifth declared candidate. Turner acknowledged that his discussions with Marchand and Trudeau had reached a dead end. “I have made arrangements with no one,” Turner told the press. “I’m my own man. I’m running my own campaign.”78
Media coverage of Turner’s declaration illuminated something critically important about the public perception of the Liberal leadership candidates. The “experienced” establishment men—Kierans, Martin, Sharp—were understood to represent the party’s past and thus to be competing mainly against each other. The “young” hipsters Turner and Trudeau, on the other hand, were perceived to be in a two-man fight for the party’s future. In the youth-obsessed 1960s, there was never any question about where the strategic advantage lay. “Mr. Turner is the closest thing to a young swinger in the leadership race,” observed the Globe’s Geoffrey Stevens. “He possesses youth, glamour, access to money, a solid academic background (including a Rhodes Scholarship), and is fluently bilingual. But he could lose this advantage if Mr. Trudeau, 46, the acknowledged swinger on Parliament Hill, enters the contest.”79 When Mitchell Sharp announced his candidacy on January 18, the collective yawn from Canadians was practically audible. “We would be in for a period of good gray Canadian government with all the style and flair of an endless civil service seminar,” commented former Tory MP Frank McGee.80 And when Paul Martin entered the race the next day, even the most generous editorialists acknowledged that he had been in politics “a long, long time.”81
John Turner was not the only person frustrated with the early jockeying of the leadership contenders. On January 16, five senior cabinet ministers—Martin, Sharp, Hellyer, MacEachen, and Marchand—were summoned to 24 Sussex Drive for dinner with the prime minister. After the meal, as the ministers were enjoying drinks, Pearson launched into a stern lecture about the continuing need for cabinet solidarity. The prime minister’s tone was later reported to have ranged from “firm to furious.”82 This dressing-down had an immediate pretext. At the Halifax convention the previous weekend, Liberal ministers had publicly debated the implementation of medicare, which was still under consideration by cabinet. (The debate centred on whether implementation of this shared-cost program, which was supposed to have begun on July 1, 1968, would be delayed as a courtesy to the provinces.) Neither Jean Marchand nor Pierre Trudeau had attended the Halifax conference or made any public pronouncement on the implementation of medicare. Indeed, the two were reportedly “dodging all questioners” and refusing to “lay their cards on the table.”83 As far as the prime minister was concerned, they alone were above suspicion.
By January 19, 1967, all of the Liberal Party heavyweights had declared themselves leadership contenders. The only exception was trade minister Robert Winters, who, like Marchand and Trudeau, was hedging. (Winters was telling insiders that he intended to quit politics and return to the private sector early in 1968.84 This rumour had the predictable result of producing a draft-Winters movement, led by Toronto-area Liberal Barry Monaghan.) A group of “second-tier” candidates would also trickle into the race, of whom the most likeable was Pearson’s lively and fluently bilingual agricultural minister, Joe Greene. The least comprehensible was Ernst Zündel, then a crusader for immigrants’ rights in Canada and later one of the world’s most notorious Holocaust deniers.85
The morning after Lester Pearson harangued his senior ministers for breaching parliamentary protocol, the Liberal cabinet endorsed Trudeau’s position on the Constitution as the one the government would carry to the February 5 federal-provincial conference. From that point on, there would be no ambiguity. Pierre Trudeau would speak for the prime minister and the government any time he discussed Canadian federalism.
Marc Lalonde knew an opportunity when he saw one. He suggested to Lester Pearson that he dispatch the justice minister to the provincial capitals to personally lay the groundwork for a successful constitutional conference. While Trudeau was out selling his plan f
or Canadian federalism to the premiers, Lalonde reasoned, he could also be selling himself to Liberal convention delegates and to Canadian voters more generally. Pearson liked the idea. National unity was the overriding issue facing Canada, he believed. The upcoming federal-provincial conference would therefore mark “the beginning of the making of a new Confederation.”86 When the prime minister announced that Trudeau would be meeting with the premiers, Pearson stated explicitly that these visits had nothing to do with the leadership contest.87 Predictably, that affirmation had exactly the opposite effect. The pundits immediately began to write about the enormous advantage a tour of the provincial capitals would bring the non-candidate Trudeau. It was a “highly unusual mission,” noted the Globe and Mail.88 “Unless he resolutely bars his hotel room door wherever he goes,” added columnist George Bain, “the Justice Minister is likely to be sought out both by the news media and by Liberals anxious to see and assess even just-possibly-maybe candidates.”89
Wherever Lalonde’s and Pearson’s ulterior motives lay, Trudeau resolved to play it absolutely straight. He was not a leadership candidate, he insisted, and he would be giving no interviews. His only concern was to forestall “useless clashes” at the upcoming federal-provincial meeting.90
Trudeau’s first stop was Edmonton, where he met with Alberta premier Ernest Manning the morning of Friday, January 19. He was accompanied by his top constitutional expert, Carl Goldenberg, who would sit in on all of his meetings with the premiers and later write a tight nine-page précis of their views for the feds’ use at the constitutional conference.91 Later the same day, Trudeau flew to Victoria, where he had a friendly tête-à-tête with B.C. premier W.A.C. Bennett. In both Western capitals, journalists found themselves shut out. “I’m not here publicly,” Trudeau told them. “I’m not seeing the press. I’m not granting any interviews.”92 Premier Bennett was less publicity-shy, however. “I’ve just had a very frank discussion with the minister,” he told reporters. “We reached complete agreement. If he ever decides to move to British Columbia, there’s a place for him in my cabinet. He’s a great Canadian.”93 Some indication of what Trudeau and Bennett discussed came to light a few days later when Bennett stated that British Columbia intended to “stand pat” on the Constitution at the upcoming conference. “That’s where we have stood for the past 100 years,” he said. “It is a solid thing, working well. We are prepared to discuss details only.”94 (Quebec premier Daniel Johnson responded immediately to Bennett’s statement, telling the press that Quebec’s position was unchanged. The province would continue to press for an entirely new Constitution.)95
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