Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  “Ambiguity makes the problem insoluble” is not as famous a Trudeauism as “Just watch me,” “Viva Fidel!” or “Fuddle duddle.” But it should be. For it encapsulated a trenchant political style that would within weeks best Trudeau’s rivals for the Liberal leadership and, ultimately, for power.

  CHAPTER SIX

  NOW YOU’RE STUCK WITH ME

  “Marchand isn’t going to be a candidate for the leadership,” Lester Pearson remarked at the end of the constitutional conference.1 For Canadian political watchers, this statement could mean only one thing: Pierre Elliott Trudeau would allow his name to stand.

  Or would he?

  In the wake of the recent Western, Atlantic, and Quebec policy conferences, Ontario Liberals would meet for their own convention at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel over the weekend that began on February 9, 1968. Aides for the non-candidate Trudeau let it be known that their man would be flying into Toronto for the event. He would appear unofficially, and he would make no formal speech. Trudeau would, however, open a hospitality suite at the Royal York in order to mingle with delegates. His total commitment of time to the convention would be three hours, maximum. “He’s coming because of pressure from us,” said a forthright Donald S. Macdonald, Liberal MP for Rosedale and a leader in the draft-Trudeau movement. “We want him to get an idea of the strength and enthusiasm for his candidacy here.”2

  Trudeau made no secret of the fact that he did not appreciate being pressed into a public appearance in Toronto. His advisers had initially encouraged him to visit the city to meet a few friends, without fanfare, in order to discuss a leadership bid. But once he had agreed to go, they booked the Royal York’s massive Ontario Room, issued invitations to conference delegates to meet Trudeau at a “coffee party,” and set up a head table from which Trudeau could hold a press conference. “I should have known, of course,” he later chided his supporters. “I want to tell you all that if I don’t run I hope I won’t be letting you down.”3 They had intuited what the justice minister himself did not yet appreciate. He was now the hottest ticket in the Liberal leadership race.

  Even in his home province, where René Lévesque, Pierre Bourgault, and Daniel Johnson were now eviscerating Trudeau at every opportunity, new and influential sources of support continued to emerge. On February 15, a draft-Trudeau petition appeared in Quebec media, stating that Trudeau “possesses all the necessary qualities” to lead. It bore the signatures of two hundred prominent Quebecers, including actor Jean-Louis Roux, writer Gilles Marcotte, and Canada Council chair Jean Martineau, among other intellectuals and professionals. Even Claude Ryan conceded that this affirmation of Trudeau’s popularity was an important development. “It must be admitted that the signatories are people with influence and definite authority in their respective milieux,” he wrote in Le Devoir.4

  In English Canada, it was the same story. To almost everyone’s astonishment, Ramsay Cook’s draft-Trudeau campaign had evolved from a modest local initiative into a national movement. “Academics,” wrote the young Toronto Star journalist Andrew Szende, “are almost unanimously speaking out in favor of the former University of Montréal law professor.”5 One of the brightest lights in this movement was Pauline Jewett, a Harvard-trained political scientist who had served as an Ontario MP in the first Pearson minority government. Like Trudeau, Jewett was a dedicated federalist and civil libertarian. (During the October Crisis of 1970, she would break with the Liberal Party over Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act.) She was drawn to Trudeau in 1968 because she believed that only a French-speaking Quebecer could head off the separatist challenge.6 But what she liked above all was his conviction. “If he decides certain things must be pursued, he pursues them with clarity and passion, as he has done with the French-English problem,” said Jewett. “He has moved shrouds of prejudice and parochialism away from the divorce question, abortion, homosexuality. Why should not this same clarity of perception and passion be brought to bear on some of the other great problems?”7

  Ramsay Cook and Pauline Jewett were among the roughly two thousand people to attend the policy convention at the Royal York. Of these, 727 would serve as Ontario delegates to the Liberal leadership convention in April.

  Like the Quebec policy convention two weeks earlier, the Toronto event proved to be yet another Trudeau show, on the first evening at least. An estimated 1,400 people crammed into the Ontario Room to meet the minister of justice. The atmosphere was electric. As a portent of things to come, receptions being held simultaneously for declared candidates Paul Hellyer and Eric Kierans were practically empty. Between 5 and 7 p.m., Trudeau worked the packed room. Ramsay Cook, who had helped to engineer the spectacle, later wrote that “Pierre seemed surprised and even a little confused by the extraordinary reception he had received in Toronto.”8 Some of the young women in attendance, identified as university students, were plainly smitten—by the man but also by his message. “Pierre can excite people like no one else can,” said one of them. “The thing has mushroomed. He’s like a savior. And a lot of it has to do with his stand on the federal problem.”9

  After meeting delegates for two hours, Trudeau agreed to talk to the press. Dressed in a light tweed jacket and dark blue tie, he took a seat between Donald Macdonald and Russell Honey, MP for Durham and chair of the Ontario Liberal caucus. Archival footage of the press conference shows Trudeau at his Zen-master best, exuding an air of serene introspection completely at odds with the chaotic energy swirling around him. He was asked about his timetable for a decision on whether to run. “At the outside, ten days,” he replied. “If I’m lucky, sooner. I don’t know whether the answer will be yes or no. There are two kinds of contacts I have to make before I decide. This kind, when I meet people I haven’t met before and try to find out what they want to do with the party and the country and why they think I should be the man to do it. Then, I will have to sift the information with close friends.” Had he been pushed by his supporters to come to Toronto? “Not pushed—induced,” he said with a smile. Did he think there should be a Quebecer in the leadership race? “Other things being equal, Quebec should be able to put forward a good candidate. But can you find him? Will he be good enough? If the answer is No, forget it! I hope there is no one in this room who is going to support me because I’m from Quebec. I have no magic solutions.”10

  After the press conference, Trudeau retired to Donald Macdonald’s suite to discuss a possible leadership bid with members of his inner circle, including Ramsay Cook, Jean-Pierre Goyer, Jim Davey, and Gordon Gibson. The small group chatted for ninety minutes. Cook sensed that the meeting was historic and took notes, which he later published.

  “What do you make of this whole thing, Ramsay?” Trudeau asked Cook. “Will they call me un roi nègre, will I fall under the same criticisms as Laurier and will I get the Uncle Louis image?”

  Cook replied that Trudeau would inevitably be called a vendu by Quebec nationalists, just like Laurier and St. Laurent. “But did that really represent the thinking of Quebecers?” he asked. “After all, they’d voted for Laurier and Uncle Louis regardless of what the nationalist intellectuals had said.”

  The conversation then turned to Trudeau’s résumé. Trudeau knew that he had the aptitude and the drive to be prime minister, but he was worried about his lack of experience. “He was afraid that he could not meet his own standards of excellence,” Cook observed. Trudeau also wanted reassurance that, if he were to become prime minister, he could count on party members and senior bureaucrats in Ottawa to stand behind him. He did not want to end up another Diefenbaker.

  Overwhelmed by the intensity of his reception in Toronto, Trudeau told his supporters that he needed solitude and the counsel of close friends to come to a final decision. “My general impression from as disinterested a view as I can take, was that I was talking to a genuinely undecided man,” Cook concluded.11 Trudeau was only too happy to escape Toronto and leave Ontario Liberals to their policy deliberations. He flew off to Montreal later t
he same evening.

  Across Canada, there was a palpable sense the next day that something extraordinary had taken place in the Ontario Room of the Royal York. And it had. Trudeaumania was born.

  Canadians had caught earlier glimpses of Pierre Trudeau’s nascent sex appeal, his hip sartorial style, and, of course, his commanding intellect. But in Toronto, the mass adulation of Trudeau’s supporters combined for the first time with the mainstream media’s willingness to cover it positively. The day after this Royal York appearance, photographs of Trudeau being warmly attentive to pretty women made the front pages of the Canadian dailies, alongside headlines like the Toronto Star’s “Liberals Make It a ‘Love-in’ for Pierre Trudeau.”12 Press stories of the justice minister obliging autograph-seekers were filed. Analogies to JFK and the Beatles were made. Almost immediately, anxious journalists and broadcasters began asking themselves whether they were covering Trudeau or inventing him.

  There were other, less obvious processes already at work in the burgeoning Trudeaumania phenomenon. Of these, the most influential (and enduring) were the calculated efforts of Trudeau’s opponents to position him as a media-generated flash in the pan. In Quebec, his nationalist critics had fashioned a “messiah” myth to explain his apparently effortless ascent in federal politics. This fiction critiqued English Canadians’ ignorance of Quebec as much as it disparaged Trudeau. But it was a powerful narrative nonetheless, the more so for having been repeated so often—and by moderates like Claude Ryan as well as separatists like René Lévesque. Naturally, many English Canadians thought this critique condescending. On February 9, the day Trudeau appeared at the Royal York, the Globe and Mail ran an editorial entitled “Not Sudden, Not a Messiah,” condemning Claude Ryan personally. “It is wrong to hold that English Canadians are incapable of judging Mr. Trudeau on any grounds but his potential as a safe or ‘messianic’ French Canadian,” stated the Globe.13 The next day, Ryan conceded in Le Devoir that there was more to the Trudeau phenomenon than the search for “un messie canadien-français.”14 But the messiah narrative stuck, and it resonates still.

  Members of the English-Canadian governing elites—many of whom saw Trudeau as a dilettante and interloper—also saw his sudden popularity as a potential Achilles’ heel. “How long can Trudeau’s non-campaign continue?” demanded one frustrated senior Liberal after the justice minister’s Royal York appearance.15 “Okay, okay,” said another, identified as an aide to one of the declared leadership hopefuls. “Let’s just cool off. He’s not the new Messiah. I’m fed up to the teeth with all this charisma.”16 Again, it fell to Canada’s seasoned political commentators to challenge the aspersion that Trudeau’s popularity was manufactured. Trudeau’s charisma was genuine, Anthony Westell wrote after the Toronto appearance. “In a sense, he is the man we would all like to be: charming, rich, talented, successful.” But Trudeaumania was not an invention of backroom Svengalis or ravenous reporters, Westell insisted. “While it is always hard to decide when reporting a bandwagon becomes pushing it, it does seem clear that the press and TV began to hear about Mr. Trudeau from the grassroots before they took him seriously as a possible candidate and began to promote him by publicizing him.”17

  In short, the persistent claim that Trudeaumania was the product of superficial media processes did not arise in isolation. It was deployed actively as a strategy to undermine Trudeau even before he announced his intention to run for the Liberal leadership. That the strategy failed—in the sense that Trudeau won power in spite of this narrative—does not diminish its importance.

  Trudeau knew exactly what he was up against, having spent so much of his adult life paddling against the current. Asked in mid-February about whispering campaigns from his Liberal leadership rivals, he replied with characteristic bravado. “They want a fight?” he said. “It makes me feel like running.”18

  In truth, Trudeau could no more be swayed by his own brawler’s instinct than by the pleas of his supporters. He continued to ponder and procrastinate. Again, it fell to his closest friends to try to cajole him into running. Meeting with Jean Marchand in Montreal just days after the Ontario convention, Trudeau reiterated all of his reservations.

  “I would prefer to wait,” he told Marchand.

  “If you don’t go in, Hellyer or Winters will be the next leader, and how long will he stay there?” Marchand countered.19

  Marc Lalonde encountered the same indecision. Trudeau acknowledged that he had succeeded in Toronto but continued to fret that he had not been in politics long enough to build up his own power base. He did not want to be one of the hapless candidates abandoned by his own people when the deals were struck at the leadership convention. “When we were arguing with him,” Lalonde later recalled, “he brought a couple of us in and said ‘If I go in, I want a commitment that you’ll be around. I want to be sure you’re not sending me out to war alone.’”20

  Meanwhile, in public, instead of adopting the cautious, equivocating style of a campaigning politician, Trudeau continued to act like a man who had nothing to lose. On February 13, he appeared on the Ottawa television program Under Attack, which pitted him against a group of francophone students in open and unscripted conversation. For any other prime ministerial hopeful, it would have been a minefield. But speaking extemporaneously to thoughtful and idealistic young Canadians, Trudeau was entirely in his element. Asked why he rejected a deux nations view of Canada, he told them, “I think French Canadians have been betrayed by their elite for one hundred years.” Asked how he felt about being called a vendu in Quebec, he replied that such insults evinced “the masochistic tendencies of just about all French Canadian nationalists.”21 At one point, the conversation turned unexpectedly to the quality of the French spoken in Quebec. Again Trudeau refused to dissemble. The government of Quebec had enjoyed full control over education for generations, he said, yet “a lot of the French spoken in Quebec is lousy (pouilleux). I don’t think Ottawa should give one single whit of power to the province of Quebec until it has shown the rest of Canada it can teach better language in its schools.”22

  Trudeau’s linguistic snobbery was by then well known to Quebecers—how he had gravitated to classical French literature in his teens and adopted correct French instead of the street slang of his local neighbourhood. “I remember being rather penalized for it,” Trudeau would later recall, “because when you’re fifteen and you suddenly begin to say ‘le gateau’ rather than ‘le gaaaateau,’ people begin poking fun at you. Not only in school, but in the neighbourhood, and even some of my relatives: ‘Oh, look, he’s putting on airs.’”23

  In Quebec, the nationalist response to Trudeau’s “lousy French” remark was predictably swift and merciless. “You are dying of hunger, you miserable little uneducated people,” René Lévesque said mockingly. “But before you get the food which is yours you must learn to beg for it with the elegance which is customary in the circles I frequent.”24 Daniel Johnson trod lightly on the matter, accusing Trudeau of indulging a “passing political expediency” and pandering to English Canada.25 In contrast, Jean-Noël Tremblay, Johnson’s outspoken cultural affairs minister, fumed that there were “few better examples of opportunism so degrading.” As journalists at the Canadian Press discovered, however, Tremblay had made the same criticism of Quebecers’ French just months earlier. “The language of the Government is bad, the language of teachers is bad, the language of business is bad, the language of information media is far from being above reproach, and the language of the elite, infected by English, isn’t much better,” Tremblay had complained. Asked about this apparent double standard, Tremblay offered the sort of nationalist response that played to Trudeau’s characterization of Quebecers as insular. “That was a family affair,” Tremblay said. “One washed one’s dirty linen in the family, if I may be permitted the expression. But it is absolutely indecent to display one’s own weaknesses outside in a foreign land (à l’étranger).”26

  On February 15, 1968, Trudeau had breakfast in Ottawa with
Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier. He had made up his mind, he told his friends. He would run for the Liberal leadership.

  Then, just hours later, he changed his mind.

  Delighted that Trudeau had finally tipped off the fence, Jean Marchand hastily organized a noon-hour press conference ostensibly to announce that he would not seek the nomination himself. He then called a meeting of the Quebec Liberal caucus, the sole purpose of which was to rally party members behind a Trudeau leadership bid. Of the fifty-three MPs and twenty-one senators who made up the federal Liberal caucus, however, only twenty people showed up. Those not in attendance offered excuses about prior commitments. Trudeau’s aides were reportedly stunned by the poor showing. So was the candidate himself. “If there are only twenty members from Quebec who support me then I’m not a candidate,” Trudeau informed the press on his way out of the meeting. “I’m the Justice Minister.”27

  Marchand was dismayed. For the rest of the day, it was unclear where Trudeau stood. The press speculated that his advisers had likely prevailed upon him, quoting Jean-Pierre Goyer to the effect that more than 80 per cent of the Liberal caucus had said that they would fall in behind Trudeau. (Where Goyer got this number was itself an open question, since half of the Quebec caucus would back candidates other than Trudeau throughout the leadership race.)28

  Not until ten o’clock the next morning did Canadians know for certain that the justice minister had decided to run. He arrived at his own press conference at the National Press Building wearing a dark grey suit and a brown fur hat, obviously at ease with his decision and exuding confidence. For an hour, Trudeau conversed casually with the hundred or so journalists who had shown up. The CBC carried the press conference live, something it had done for no other candidate.