Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  On Saturday, January 20, Trudeau met with Saskatchewan premier Ross Thatcher in Regina. The following day, he met with Ontario premier John Robarts at Queen’s Park. The Toronto meeting was conducted under heavy police security and described by local media as “hush-hush.” (Trudeau and his aides had to present their credentials to breach the cordon around the premier’s office.) When Trudeau and Robarts emerged from their meeting, the poker-faced Trudeau again refused any comment. “I’m sorry,” he told the press. “You can see how it is.”96 But there was no mistaking Robarts’s happy demeanour. “We are working towards what we hope will be a successful conference and we’re all pleased with the outcome of this meeting,” he said with an exuberant smile.97 Jean Marchand, who had sat in on the Toronto meeting, was cornered by reporters while he was waiting for an elevator. He could not conceal his delight at the positive press Trudeau was attracting. “What leadership race?” he asked with a broad grin. “Is there a leadership race on?”98 To Torontonians, all of this warm camaraderie indicated something significant. The next day, the front-page headline in the Toronto Star speculated, “Ontario, Ottawa Reach Accord on Confederation Meeting.”99

  Trudeau met with Manitoba premier Walter Weir in Winnipeg on Monday, January 22. The next evening, he appeared on the CBC-TV show Newsmagazine, where he broke his silence and chatted casually for half an hour about the state of Canadian federalism. Well-briefed and lucid, Trudeau made it clear that his long-standing reservations about opening constitutional negotiations prematurely had not abated. Perhaps the provinces were correct, and the time was right for a “showdown” on the division of powers, he said. But Premier Robarts’s Confederation of Tomorrow conference had demonstrated that “no province had any clear idea of what the new constitution should be.” The federal government would agree to “rewrite the British North America Act if people want to,” he said, but it would not participate in a Canadian version of “Munich” (a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Adolf Hitler). If the provinces and the feds could address the language issue in a bill of rights, he concluded, then negotiating the “mechanics” of constitutional reform might follow relatively easily.100 Otherwise, nothing was certain.

  Trudeau’s articulation of his federalist ideas on Newsmagazine was widely interpreted as a watershed moment in his televisual appeal to Canadians. Analogies were made to JFK. “A new and totally unforeseen thing has happened in the past month that has turned Canadian eyes—at last—away from the U.S. political scene,” gushed media critic Roy Shields. “Overnight, Pierre Elliott Trudeau has arrived. There has been nothing like him since the beginning of television in this country. The justice minister’s few television appearances, such as last week’s interview on Newsmagazine, have stirred Canadians from coast-to-coast. Viewers (and I have tested a lot of them on this) are strangely reminded of John Kennedy.” Yet even for Shields, Trudeau’s appeal was not primarily about style but about substance. “The basic issue that turns all Canadians to their television sets,” he asserted, was “Will we get a leader who can hold the nation together?”101 Elsewhere, Canadian editorialists lavished praise on Trudeau for not “visiting Munich.” “Canadians who want their federal government to draw a line somewhere against the ballooning pretensions and demands of Quebec will be heartened by the statements of Justice Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his appearance on CBC Newsmagazine last night,” said the Toronto Star. “He is right in opposing a racial division of political power.”102

  On Thursday, January 25, Trudeau resumed his tour of the provincial capitals, meeting with Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and Nova Scotia premier G.I. Smith. Echoing W.A.C. Bennett and John Robarts, the gregarious Smallwood refused to reveal specifics but gave every indication that he was smitten with Trudeau. “We have come to complete and unanimous agreement on what Canada’s future should be,” he said. Trudeau was “the perfect Canadian” and a “brilliant” MP.103 The not-so-subtle message was that Smallwood would be only too happy to deliver Newfoundland’s convention delegates to Trudeau whenever the justice minister decided to enter the Liberal leadership contest. After his three-hour evening meeting with Premier Smith, Trudeau was asked if he could think of anything that might make him run for the Liberal leadership. “No, not right now I can’t,” he answered.104 He met with New Brunswick premier Louis Robichaud and P.E.I. premier Alexander Campbell the next day.

  Back at Trudeau headquarters, Marc Lalonde and his inner circle could not have been more delighted. If the twin goals of Trudeau’s tour had been to assert his dominance on the constitutional debate and raise his profile in English Canada, the strategy had exceeded everyone’s expectations. In the premiers’ offices, on the country’s editorial pages, and on Canada’s television screens, Trudeau was a hit. Peter C. Newman, never one for understatement, caught the public mood. “Because it contains so many mysterious elements, the Pierre Trudeau candidacy for the Liberal leadership is more interesting than all the others put together,” he wrote. “While the other candidates talk themselves hoarse, most of the whispers about the race concern the enigmatic swinger who is currently Canada’s minister of justice, and who could become the most exciting prime minister this country has ever had.”105

  In this heady atmosphere, with the non-candidate Pierre Trudeau riding a wave of popularity, Quebec Liberals gathered in Montreal for their own policy convention. The timing could not have been more propitious. It would be the delegates’ first opportunity to hear from the party’s leadership hopefuls and their last opportunity to hammer out a unified position on the Constitution before the February 5 federal-provincial conference.

  The convention took place over the weekend of January 26 at Place Bonaventure and drew roughly 1,500 delegates. From the outset, the media called it the “Trudeau show.” “It was a little too chilly for sandals, such as he wears on summer afternoons in the House of Commons,” said one report. “But otherwise, cool cat Pierre Elliott Trudeau took his ‘different’ world of style with him to the Quebec Liberal convention this weekend, turning up in a skinny knit tie, bright sport coat, green leather overcoat and a leather fedora.”106 All of the top-tier leadership hopefuls were also in attendance—Sharp, Kierans, Turner, Martin, and Hellyer. But as Globe correspondent Lewis Seale observed, they knew even before they got there that they would likely spend the weekend “running like mad in order to keep from being knocked right out of Quebec by the Trudeau boomlet.”107

  Members of Trudeau’s entourage knew that they were indeed holding all the cards. The feds’ “showdown” with Premier Daniel Johnson was just days away, and the shock waves of René Lévesque’s souveraineté-association proposal were still reverberating around the province. In the electric atmosphere created by these events, Trudeau’s cerebral calm thrived. More important, Trudeau’s supporters had deftly manoeuvred themselves into positions from which they could stage-manage the event. Jean Marchand gave the opening address on Friday night. Sounding very much like Trudeau, he blasted Quebec politicians who claimed that only they could represent the interests of Quebecers. “In certain cases we are in the presence of a shameless exploitation of French Canadian nationalism,” he told the crowd. “And it is a sure thing that the people will ultimately foot the bill for this embryonic and virulent racism.”108 There had been considerable speculation that Marchand might use his speech to announce that he would not run for the Liberal leadership—which, of course, would all but guarantee that Trudeau would run.109 It did not happen. Instead, Marchand told delegates not to be distracted from the main issue—the Constitution. “During the next two months you will have all the time you need to worry about the leadership convention,” he said. “This is why we have asked the leadership candidates to abstain from using this convention for electoral purposes.”110

  Even more important than Marchand’s role in setting the scene for Trudeau were the preparations that had been laid by Jean-Pierre Goyer, MP for Dollard and chair of the Liberal policy committee. Goyer schedule
d policy workshops on culture, regional development, and foreign affairs for Saturday, leaving Sunday free for the climactic debate on the Constitution. Well before delegates began filing into Montreal, they knew that Goyer would sponsor an “omnibus resolution” on the Constitution and that Trudeau would take to the convention stage to present it. The resolution, distributed to party members in advance, contained three general provisions. The first was to require that the Bi and Bi recommendations on official bilingualism be implemented. The second was to affirm the right of the federal government to legislate for all Canadians in the fields of social and tax policy. The third and most important was to press for a constitutional bill of rights to protect the linguistic rights of French- and English-speaking minorities across Canada.111

  Of the many topics debated on Saturday, January 27, the most newsworthy was the monarchy. After a heated debate that ran well into the evening hours, delegates voted 135 to 33 to abolish the monarchy and establish Canada as a republic.112 This dramatic gesture was widely seen as a move by young Liberals to undercut the sovereignists’ exploitation of the issue, since, as Pierre Bourgault had been telling Quebecers for years, the monarchy was a demeaning symbol of their colonial status. As always, Pierre Trudeau was indifferent to this debate. He had no interest in “flapping his arms” in sterile squabbles over symbols. “I want the good of the French Canadians,” he commented after the vote. “I don’t want them just to be emotionally satisfied. I want them to become a great people and doing away with the monarchy won’t change them a little bit. It would make a few people happier, that’s all. Let them keep the monarchy and let them have something to attack if they want, but they should spend their time on more important things.”113 Oddly enough, Quebec premier Daniel Johnson felt exactly the same way, and for the same reasons.

  The debate on the Constitution got under way as scheduled the morning of Sunday, January 28. Trudeau addressed an animated crowd of roughly a thousand delegates, speaking for fifty minutes. Using a slide show illustrating the various political options that lay before Quebecers, Trudeau critiqued René Lévesque’s souveraineté-association as well as the deux nations concept favoured by Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson. “Personally,” Trudeau told the delegates, “I believe that it is not a particular status in Confederation for the government of Quebec but an equal status for all French-speaking Canadians in all of Canada that will bring enduring unity to our country. But we must not confuse the rights of French-Canadians with the legitimate or illegitimate desire of a provincial government to build itself a little empire. I ask you to keep your minds clear and sharp. Don’t confuse the rights of French-Canadians with provincial powers.”114 Trudeau promised to forge “une alliance” with Daniel Johnson to entrench French-language rights across Canada—a proposal that would later play extremely well in Quebec.115 To add some levity to the proceedings, he also joked about the fondness of certain Union Nationale politicians for the “Peugeot cars and bureaucratic empires” of Charles de Gaulle’s France. “France has adopted 17 constitutions in the last 180 years,” Trudeau quipped. “When a constitution lasts a few years, the French become bored and try to give new constitutions to other countries!”116 His partisan audience roared with laughter.

  When Trudeau concluded his speech, the crowd burst into a standing ovation and sang “Il a gagné ses épaulettes.” Everywhere he went for the remainder of the day, he was besieged by reporters and cameras. Before the conference broke up Sunday evening, convention delegates voted unanimously to approve the Goyer/Trudeau resolution on the Constitution. The justice minister returned to Ottawa knowing that his bill of rights now had the solid support of Quebec Liberals.

  The Montreal conference was hailed as a triumph for Trudeau, particularly in English Canada. Veteran Toronto Star reporter Dominique Clift called his performance “dazzling” and speculated that “all Trudeau has to say now is ‘I’m running’ and he’ll get almost solid backing from the Quebec delegates to the leadership convention.”117 Lewis Seale at the Globe correctly gauged the impact of Trudeau’s constitutional ideas on party members. “His offer of the closest co-operation with Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson in seeking the equality of French-Canadians and English-Canadians—but not for helping Quebec City build its own little empire—made the federal Liberals feel for the first time in years that they are in the van of the struggle.”118 The Edmonton Journal congratulated Trudeau for challenging “the myth that Quebec, as opposed to Canada as a whole, is the homeland of the French-Canadian.”119 The Toronto Star praised him for “going to the heart of the Canadian crisis with a boldness which we hope other federal Liberals will emulate in dealing with Quebec.”120 It was all too much for Claude Ryan, who again accused the English-Canadian press of “un messianisme.”121

  Premier Daniel Johnson was listening closely to Trudeau, of course. Commenting the day after the convention ended, Johnson protested that he was no separatist and thus Trudeau had no reason to call him an empire builder. “If I felt that separatism was the solution, well, what better time could we hope for than now?” Johnson demanded. “He for one has no excuse for using a word like ‘empire,’ intimating that Quebec might want to represent not only its population but also all the French. There’s nothing imperialistic in our minds.”122

  To many Canadians, Trudeau’s performance at the Liberal policy convention had been yet another tour de force—from the perfect choreography of Marc Lalonde, Jean Marchand, and Jean-Pierre Goyer to Trudeau’s own flawless execution. The minister of justice, still touted as a man for tomorrow, emerged as the man of the hour, his name on everyone’s lips, his face on the nation’s front pages.

  Yet doubts remained. Trudeau’s closest friends knew that he was far too savvy to be beguiled by his own press. Furthermore, they knew that one of his non-negotiable conditions for entering the leadership race was to have the solid backing of Quebec Liberals. Alas, while the convention had proven a triumph on the constitutional front, questions remained about Trudeau’s appeal to Quebecers. Forestry minister Maurice Sauvé had been stating publicly for months that Quebec Liberals should vote en masse for an English-Canadian candidate, preferably Paul Martin.123 Claude Ryan, still one of the most influential public voices in the province, remained tentative on Trudeau. “We will have to wait until the delegates get back to their constituencies,” said Ryan. “I’m not sure that Pierre is prepared to go far enough in satisfying the demands of Quebec. I haven’t made up my mind.”124 Peter C. Newman, whose personal attachment to Trudeau was now beyond question, nonetheless continued to report that Mitchell Sharp was the most highly favoured leadership contender among Quebec Liberal ministers, including Jean Chrétien and Jean-Luc Pépin.125 Even among rank-and-file Quebec Liberals, there were persistent whispers that Marchand’s “dictatorial” leadership style had skewed the pitch in Trudeau’s favour.126

  There was no guarantee, in short, that a Trudeau candidacy could win the support of Quebec’s 626 delegates to the leadership convention or, indeed, anything close to that number. The justice minister thus remained as uncertain as ever about running. As an exasperated aide of one of the declared leadership candidates said, “We don’t know what the hell Trudeau is going to do!”127

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

  To a degree that is almost impossible to imagine today, Canadians in the era of the five-channel universe were enthralled by the prospect of a nationally televised federal-provincial conference. In February 1968, the phrase “constitutional fatigue” lay decades in the future, the product of a history Canadians today know only too well (two Quebec referenda on sovereignty, the 1981 nuit des longs couteaux, the 1982 repatriation, René Lévesque’s beau risque, the Meech and Charlottetown accords, the Clarity Act). Over the winter of 1968, when Canada was widely understood to be facing the worst national-unity crisis in memory, Canadians anticipated the Canada of Tomorrow conference on February 5 with a degree of anticipation they normally reserved for the NHL playoffs.r />
  For the first time in history, television crews would broadcast the faces, voices, and ideas of Canada’s political leaders as they debated the Constitution in real time. This fact alone made the conference a milestone in participatory democracy. In the weeks leading up to the event, the two national networks, CBC and CTV, fought a “battle for prestige” over broadcast rights that Canadians had until then identified exclusively with American politics.1 To no one’s surprise, CBC/Radio-Canada was the eventual winner. The national broadcaster set up four cameras around the horseshoe-shaped table in the Confederation Room of Parliament’s West Block, where the main sessions would be held. Two more cameras were placed in an anteroom designed to function as an interview studio. A crew of 125 technicians, journalists, and commentators was mobilized.2 Newspapers ran frothy columns pressing Canadians to do their civic duty and tune in to the proceedings. “All Canada belongs at this conference,” said the Globe and Mail. “Nothing could more surely bring home to all Canadians the vastness of Canada, the variety of Canada, the pressures that beat upon and the hopes that gleam ahead of Canada than to take the whole nation to the talks.”3 The Toronto Star ran the unambiguous headline “At Stake Next Monday Morning: National Survival.”4