Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  “The moment one pretends that one province speaks in the name of a nation, or that certain powers are required to protect the interests of this nation,” Trudeau lectured Johnson, “then the members of this nation cease participating in a federal form of government.” What was needed to protect Quebecers was a guarantee of linguistic rights, said Trudeau. “This is what we mean by the equality of two communities. When this equality is reached and guaranteed in a constitutional document, then I believe the question of special powers becomes an affront to French-Canadians.” Trudeau rejected Johnson’s deux nations view of Canada out of hand. “I think the theory of the two nations is not a theory that the French Canadians support,” he said. “It is not applicable from either a constitutional or a political point of view. This kind of confusion which has existed for some time in this country should not be perpetuated.”33

  Unaccustomed to such effrontery, a visibly irritated Johnson dismissed what he called Trudeau’s “sophisms.” “What would Quebec MPs do in Ottawa in such a case?” he asked. “Why not hand over everything to the same MPs—education, health, social security and so on? Why not close down the Quebec legislature and set up a unitary state?”34

  “I’m a French-Canadian,” Trudeau responded. “But your difficulties are not with the federal government but with federalism itself. If Canada wishes to give a very special status to Quebec and still grant everything that the French Canadians ask for, in terms of language and in terms of representation in Ottawa, this is fine. If we can have our cake and eat it too, I am very happy—and the frosting and the candles too!”35

  Johnson then accused Trudeau of showboating with an eye to his undeclared leadership bid. If Trudeau were to succeed Pearson as prime minister, he said, “this would be enough to blow up Canada.”36

  “If Mr. Johnson’s policies are followed, they will destroy federalism,” Trudeau replied. “When you are the leader of the Union Nationale, you have to say that kind of stuff. You have to try to destroy French Canadians in Ottawa and that’s the kind of tactics you use.”37

  Johnson reiterated his view that Trudeau’s guaranteed language rights were hardly going to quench Quebecers’ desire for greater autonomy. “It’s not an aspirin that’s going to regulate the problem,” he asserted. “The problem goes deeper than that.”38

  Tensions escalated. At one point, Johnson referred condescendingly to Trudeau as “the member for Mount Royal,” which everyone understood to mean that he represented a predominantly English-speaking constituency and could not therefore speak for French Quebecers. Trudeau responded by calling Johnson “the deputy for Bagot,” presumably because Johnson had served as Premier Duplessis’s deputy in the 1950s.

  When the melee threatened to derail the proceedings, Pearson, ever the diplomat, called an unscheduled coffee break. The feud continued outside the room, as each man took questions from journalists. Johnson repeated his earlier charge that Trudeau’s views did not represent those of federal MPs from Quebec. “To be leader of a federal party, it is necessary to show the rest of Canada that he can’t be pushed around by Quebec,” he asserted.39

  An angry Trudeau responded. “Just because Mr. Johnson has separatists and federalists in his Cabinet who cannot agree,” he observed, “he thinks that is the way all Cabinets operate. We hammered out all our positions over a long period.”40

  The prime minister had maintained a smiling facade throughout the standoff, but he was plainly unsettled by Trudeau’s belligerence. It was redolent of the “terse obscenities” Trudeau had occasionally hurled at his nationalist adversaries in Quebec, which Pearson thought beneath a government minister. Premier Smith of Nova Scotia concurred with the prime minister, later remarking that “Trudeau should not have started by antagonizing his colleagues.”41 The other premiers, however, seemed to agree with Ross Thatcher, who remarked that it was “a good thing” that the minister of justice had injected some passion into the discussion. “I can only hope Mr. Trudeau’s statements will give Mr. Johnson pause to stop and think about Quebec’s demands,” Thatcher commented.42

  After the coffee break, all of the delegates reassembled in a closed-door session to consider whether or not to shutter the conference permanently to outsiders. The decision not to do so took only twenty minutes, after which the press was invited back in. For the rest of the morning, Lester Pearson stage-managed the proceedings carefully, avoiding any repeat of the earlier fireworks. He made sure the premiers kept to the relatively benign question of implementing Bi and Bi recommendations, deflecting allusions to Trudeau’s charter whenever they arose.

  On his way out to lunch, Trudeau was asked by a Quebec journalist to comment on his argument with Johnson. “There was no argument,” Trudeau replied coolly. “There were explanations, which were begun yesterday by Mr. Smallwood, about the nature of federalism.”43

  Trudeau, having returned to his usual imperturbable state, took the floor Tuesday afternoon to present the premiers with his prepared statement on behalf of the federal government. “Ordinarily,” he began, “one of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a speaker is for him to find that those who have spoken before him have anticipated his text and scooped his material. But on this occasion I know you will understand me when I say that I was very pleased yesterday to hear some of the speakers choose words which I would have been proud to use in describing the importance of a Canadian Charter of Human Rights.”

  From there, Trudeau offered the premiers—and Canadians watching via television—the most forceful defence of his constitutional vision for Canada that he had made to date. In simple language, it laid out the terms and logic of his charter of human rights. “What better place to start on constitutional reform than by asserting the human freedoms to which we believe people in this country are entitled as of right?” asked Trudeau.

  The Charter of Human Rights attempts to do that. It reflects the government’s proposal that we take steps to recognize and protect the most fundamental of our social values. I wish to make it clear that in proposing this measure there is no suggestion that the federal government is seeking any power at the expense of the provinces. We are stating that we are willing to surrender some of our power to the people of Canada, and we are suggesting that the provincial governments surrender some of their power to the people in the respective provinces. It is because we are a federal state, with competence to legislate divided between provincial governments and the federal government, that we must all act in order effectively to protect all of the rights of all of the people. Knowing, whether they be Manitobans, Quebeckers or Prince Edward Islanders, that they have common values; that they are united in these respects as Canadians—not divided provincially by differences. This is the strength of Canada.44

  It was a powerful speech, the more so because it came from the man who personified the ideas it communicated. But as Trudeau well knew—a day and a half into the conference and mere hours after his clash with Daniel Johnson—even the most rigorous defence of his charter was unlikely to secure its victory. Several of the premiers expressed their gratitude for his exemplary dedication and hard work but reiterated their misgivings about adopting his charter before they had studied it thoroughly. Daniel Johnson was gracious in his response to Trudeau’s proposal but, to no one’s surprise, held firmly to his position that Quebec would before long enshrine its own bill of rights, which it was well within its powers to do. Ernest Manning asserted that Trudeau’s charter could not be embedded in the Constitution without the unanimous consent of the provinces—which some experts later identified as its true “death knell.”45 The minister of justice had taken his proposal as far as he could, on this day at least. His presentation concluded, the discussion shifted to issues of economic development.

  Trudeau could take consolation in the knowledge that it was not his formal statement that made headlines across Canada the next day but his willingness to stand up to the Quebec premier. “Premier Daniel Johnson of Quebec and Justice Minister Pierre Tr
udeau squared off yesterday over the division of powers between Ottawa and Quebec in a discussion that shed more light on the root issues involved in the conference than all of the prepared speeches heard the day before,” said a Globe and Mail editorial. “The exchange exposed nerve ends, personal attitudes and political ambitions. Far from breaking the conference up, the debate gave it new meaning and momentum.”46 Globe columnist Anthony Westell asserted that Trudeau’s besting of Johnson had been an intellectual victory. Johnson, wrote Westell, “is not used to having his demands disputed in detail, to having contrary views put directly to Quebec over his head, and by a French Canadian. Trudeau is among the few men in Ottawa intellectually capable of debating with Mr. Johnson on his own ground, and the last thing the Premier wants is to have this opponent become Prime Minister.”47

  Oddly, the sarcasm in Trudeau’s retort about “having our cake and eating it too” was lost on the Toronto Star, which roasted him for surrendering his prerogative to defend federalism. “The two were eyeball-to-eyeball and suddenly one blinked,” said the Star. “Alas, not Daniel Johnson, the guerrilla raider from Quebec, but Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the champion of federal power and the new hero to Canadian intellectuals (English-speaking division). Why did Mr. Trudeau flinch?”48

  The prevailing sentiment in French-speaking Quebec was disappointment. The spectacle of two Quebecers quarrelling on national television edified no one, Claude Ryan lamented in Le Devoir. That the feud appeared to have “delighted” some English Canadians, including Premier Bennett, simply exacerbated Quebecers’ sense of isolation.49

  On one thing almost everyone could agree. Only Trudeau and Johnson had shown panache. The other premiers were “depressingly drab.”50

  On the final day of the conference, Wednesday, February 7, delegates returned to their deliberations in a more conciliatory mood. The prime minister had hosted a dinner at 24 Sussex Drive for the premiers the previous evening, and a forthright private discussion of language rights had run into the early hours of the next morning. The makings of a face-saving consensus on language rights were within Pearson’s grasp as he opened the final day’s first session. An obliging Daniel Johnson took pains to reassure the others that he had not come to Ottawa to make trouble. “If we did not think it possible to live within federalism, we would not be here,” he said. “We need a federal Government.”51

  Lester Pearson tried and failed in the morning to get the premiers to commit to a process for entrenching language rights. Hoping to salvage something concrete from the conference, he and his advisers spent their lunch break preparing a draft communiqué affirming the principle of language equality and the need for continuing constitutional discussions. The terms of the communiqué were accepted by all of the premiers with only minor modifications, and the document was later celebrated as a triumph for the indefatigable Pearson. “As a matter of equity, French-speaking Canadians outside of Quebec should have the same rights as English-speaking Canadians in Quebec,” the statement affirmed.52 As for next steps, seven subcommittees would be struck to study the issues raised at the conference and to meet regularly over the next several years. One of these would be “a special committee” mandated to examine “language rights and their effective provision in practice.”53 This was as close as the conference would get to affirming the principles set out in Trudeau’s draft charter.

  Most Canadians agreed that the gathering had achieved more than anyone had any right to expect but far less than they had hoped. Given the high stakes, observed Anthony Westell at the Globe and Mail, it was perhaps sufficient that three days of meetings had ended “in goodwill, a shower of mutual congratulations and an agreement on the practical machinery for reshaping Confederation.”54 Given the hype that had preceded the conference, though, and the attention accorded Trudeau’s nation-saving charter proposal, some Canadians were bitterly disappointed. “A Constitutional Design Lies in Pieces” announced the editorial page of the Toronto Star. Trudeau’s “high-minded and unifying” idea of a charter of rights had failed, the paper noted bluntly. It had been hived off to a committee of experts, but, in truth, “it is for practical purposes already dead, killed by the opposition of Ontario and others.”55

  Almost everyone in Canada agreed that Lester Pearson’s performance at the conference had been “dazzling.”56 He had deployed every trick he had learned as a diplomat to prevent the conference from self-destructing—including reining in his combative justice minister. As Daniel Johnson noted wryly of the prime minister, “He knows when to call a coffee break.”57 If Pearson was disappointed not to have got more out of the premiers, he did not show it. “I think it was a most successful conference and all we could reasonably expect to do at this first meeting,” he said—knowing that it would, in fact, be his last.58

  Daniel Johnson was eminently gracious as the proceedings wound down. “I want the conference to have no doubt at all on what is in the back of my mind,” he said. “I have not given up the idea of finding a new federal formula where the provinces will be happier, where French Canadians will feel at home all across Canada.”59 Johnson would later tell reporters that he thought the greatest achievement of the conference was to have undermined the appeal of Quebec separatism. “Without this breakthrough we would have had to drop all talk of a French-Canadian nation and everyone would have fallen back on the idea of a Quebec nation,” he said. “Don’t be misled by words. I am not looking for a special status.”60

  René Lévesque, on the other hand—the invisible twelfth man at the table, as Peter C. Newman memorably put it—told the Quebec press that the province’s true interests had not been represented at the conference by anyone.61 Since Lévesque had launched his Mouvement souveraineté-association the previous fall, his star had been rising along with Trudeau’s—oddly enough, even in English Canada. On the evening of February 6, just hours after Trudeau’s televised spat with Johnson, CTV broadcast a ninety-minute English-language documentary positioning Trudeau and Lévesque as larger-than-life titans battling for the hearts and minds of Quebecers. One critic called it “the finest program the network has ever produced,” affirming that Trudeau and Lévesque had come to personify the debate about Quebec’s future within, or outside, Canada.62

  As for the quotidian question of whether the conference had strengthened national unity, it seemed to many Canadians that little had been accomplished beyond what the Bi and Bi report had recommended. It cannot have escaped Trudeau’s notice that the voluntary implementation of bilingualism by some of the provinces actually worked against his charter. Although Daniel Johnson could not take credit for this outcome of the conference, he acknowledged that it had strengthened his own hand. “The French language in other provinces is in less danger now that several premiers have shown themselves ready to legislate in its favor,” he observed. “I don’t see any urgency in applying federal proposals since the French language will be given a proper place in several provinces. I wouldn’t like to see something imposed by this conference, and far less by the federal government. We don’t want federal authorities intervening in provincial matters, even for the sake of the Bi and Bi report.”63 Trudeau himself took the matter in stride. Asked after the conference about his “cherished” charter of human rights, he said, “We’ll keep hammering away with it.”64

  The verdict on Trudeau’s performance was mixed. Globe and Mail columnist Bruce West thought that the justice minister had come across as “a reasonable and persuasive voice which soothes the smarting feelings of the long-frustrated WASPs and yet, at the same time, says nothing which should bring a sense of outrage to his fellow French-Canadians.”65 Others thought the conference had dealt Trudeau a hard blow. “As the dust settles on this week’s great constitutional debate in Ottawa,” wrote Paul Fox in the Toronto Star, “one fact sticks out like a sore thumb. Justice Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was dead wrong in making a bill of rights the first requirement of any constitutional revision. It ignored the basic element in the present constitut
ional wrangle—the simple fact that Quebec is on fire with French-Canadian nationalism, and the blaze won’t be extinguished by smothering it under a blanket of civil liberties.”66

  Writing in Canadian Forum, Abraham Rotstein, a University of Toronto economist and a leading Canadian nationalist, went even further. Like many Quebec nationalists, then and later, he identified Trudeau’s own rigidity as a threat to Canadian national unity. “If the Constitutional Conference has bought us some time,” wrote Rotstein, “and a new climate for an accommodation with Quebec, it would be a national disaster to have these dissipated by the forthright and intemperate exercise of Trudeau’s ideological convictions on the evils of nationalism.”67

  And that is the salient point.

  By February 8, 1968, Canadians could have no doubt whatsoever where Trudeau stood on Canada, Quebec, and the Constitution. As he had done during the parliamentary debates on his divorce and omnibus bills, Trudeau had mastered his brief, laid whatever groundwork he could for a successful outcome, stated his views clearly and simply, defended them in open debate with his adversaries, and accomplished it all with Canadians watching. “Mr. Trudeau has left no room for misunderstanding of his position,” York University historians J.L. Granatstein and Peter Oliver affirmed in the Globe and Mail. “No one can doubt that he is against special status for Quebec; no one can doubt that he is a convinced federalist. As Mr. Trudeau himself is at pains to point out, for 15 years he has been saying the same thing.”68

  Of the many quotable comments Pierre Trudeau made during the constitutional conference, one stood out: “Ambiguity makes the problem insoluble.”69 Several days later, in a feature interview on CBC-TV, he elaborated. “I’m not quite sure what the Quebec delegation wants. I’m not quite sure that they know what they want either. We’ve been talking about a new constitution in this country for half-a-dozen years and still we’re not quite sure what people want to put into it.”70