Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  The first question was the most obvious. Why had he declared himself? “If I try to assess what happened in the past two months,” he replied,

  I have a suspicion you people had a lot to do with it. If anybody’s to blame I suppose it’s you collectively. To be quite frank, if I try to analyze it, well, I think in the subconscious mind of the press, it started out like a huge practical joke on the Liberal party. And what happened, I think, is that the joke blew up in your face and in mine. People took it seriously. And when members of Parliament formed committees to draft me, and when I got responsible Liberals in responsible positions in different parts of the country telling me seriously that I should run—I didn’t think the Liberal party would take me, and suddenly they did. So I was stuck with it. Well, now you’re stuck with me.

  Trudeau was then asked about whether he thought he had the right kind of experience. “I think I have less experience than all the other, or most of the other, candidates, in terms of departments or belonging to a political party. But I have to reflect on other aspects of this question, and I must say to myself in honesty that there are some fields in which experience isn’t much of a help, and the help is mainly through the approach you have to the problems.” He was asked about his late entry into the race and his much-publicized hesitation. “I feel that it’s going to be a very interesting campaign,” he replied. “Now that I’m in it, I’m absolutely delighted.”29

  Decades later, when he was writing his memoirs, Trudeau cited only one exchange from this historic February 1968 press conference. A journalist asked him if it was true that he wanted to put Quebec in its place. “Yes, absolutely,” Trudeau replied. “And its place is within Canada, with all the advantages and all the influence to which our province is entitled.”30

  The press response to Trudeau’s announcement was mixed, in part because it seemed anticlimactic after all the feverish speculation. Claude Ryan lamented in Le Devoir that Trudeau’s intractability on the Constitution threatened Canadian federalism when it was at its most fragile. Liberal delegates might elect Trudeau leader out of a “desire for novelty” or an “obsession with electoral victory,” wrote Ryan, but this choice would surely demonstrate that “they do not understand what has happened in Quebec since 1960.” The party would be far better off in the short term with an English-Canadian leader who was willing to negotiate a new division of powers with Quebec, even if he was less intelligent than Trudeau.31

  Echoing Le Devoir, the Toronto Star editorial asked, “Is Canada ready for Pierre Trudeau?” It would be “exciting to have a brilliant, uninhibited intellectual in the prime minister’s office,” said the Star. “It would also be risky. Mr. Trudeau is constitutionally incapable of trying to be all things to all men.”32 The Globe and Mail welcomed Trudeau into the race not merely as a Quebecer but as a principled minister who had earned respect across the country. The job now before him, however, was to tell Canadians how he would govern. “We know he would reverse the trend of governments to put reins on the liberties of individuals,” said the Globe. “We know he doesn’t think our problems can be resolved by switching to a republican form of government. But we don’t know how he would tackle the housing crisis, development of resources, immigration, poverty, international relations; and we will want to know.”33

  How ordinary Canadians felt about the Trudeau candidacy also concerned the press. Patricia Jolivet, the wife of B.C. Liberal Federation president Larry Jolivet, was asked why she supported Trudeau. “We desperately need a new image and we need a strong federalist,” she replied. “It’s about time we took a gamble instead of sticking with the same stodgy old people. And anyway I think he’s sexy.”34 Montreal lawyer G.J. Szablowski chastised Trudeau’s Quebec adversaries for deliberately misrepresenting him. “It is clear, for those who have read or listened to the ideas of Mr. Trudeau, that rigidity and intransigence have no place either in ideas or in his manner of expression,” wrote Szablowski in Le Devoir.35 In Manitoba, where polls showed Paul Hellyer leading, party elites appeared to be more sceptical about Trudeau’s résumé. “What does Trudeau know about hog prices?” asked one of them.36

  Coincidentally, just as Trudeau was entering the leadership race, the Watkins Report on foreign investment in Canada exploded onto the nation’s front pages. Mel Watkins was a University of Toronto economist heading up a task force on U.S. investment in Canada—an issue that had been on the national agenda since Walter Gordon’s Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects in the mid-1950s. Foreign direct investment in Canada would remain a red-hot topic in English-Canadian intellectual circles well into the 1970s, where it became a cause célèbre for left-nationalists who believed that nothing less than Canadian sovereignty was at stake.37 Not surprisingly, the anti-nationalist Trudeau thought little of the sort of economic protectionism championed by Gordon and Watkins, and had been saying so since his Cité libre days. The day he announced his candidacy, he was asked his position on the Watkins Report. “I’m against nationalism and economic nationalism as defined by the economists, which is an excessive doctrine that could work against the country,” he replied.38 This was a message Trudeau would repeat, without guile or obfuscation, throughout the Trudeaumania period, alienating some of the intellectuals who might have otherwise gravitated towards him.

  One Liberal who appreciated Trudeau’s candour, oddly enough, was Walter Gordon. “If anyone wants to know who I think is the best man for the job of Prime Minister, I think it’s Mr. Trudeau,” Gordon would announce in mid-March. “I’m going to vote for him.”39 Trudeau was grateful to have Gordon’s backing but took pains to reiterate his opposition to economic protectionism. “My approach to economics is the same as my approach to politics,” he said. “It’s a very great disgust of this thing called nationalism. And so far as Mr. Gordon’s ideas are rightly or wrongly identified with high degrees of protectionism or of nationalism, I’m against them.” Trudeau was asked his opinion of Gordon. “He is a man with a critical mind, an intellectual man, and I like a man who asks questions, asks what are you doing this for, and doesn’t let the rest of us get away with things,” he replied. “Having seen Mr. Gordon in action I must say he is not as much of a Gordonite as his disciples.”40 The closest Trudeau would get to “Gordonite” policies during the leadership campaign was to state his openness to the idea of a federal agency to foster Canadian competitiveness in transportation and communication technology (that is, a Canada Development Corporation). Otherwise, his position was unambiguous. “Neither hothouse cultures nor hothouse economics will survive in the rugged world of tomorrow,” he said.41

  Now that Trudeau was finally a declared candidate, his clandestine organization moved out of the shadows. Marc Lalonde and Gérard Pelletier took charge of the campaign, ably assisted by speech writers Tim Porteous, Don Peacock, and Ramsay Cook. (Jean Marchand would resign as leader of the Quebec caucus on March 7 in order to join the Trudeau team. One of his first public statements was to warn Quebec premier Daniel Johnson not to meddle in the leadership race.) Money was managed by the capable but virtually invisible Robert Brouillard. Jim Davey ran the campaign on the ground up to the convention weekend, when Jean-Pierre Goyer took over. Pierre Levasseur anchored Trudeau’s Ottawa headquarters. Gordon Gibson became Trudeau’s executive assistant, accompanying the candidate out on the hustings. (After Gibson was injured in a motorcycle accident, Bill Lee would replace him in mid-campaign.) Other long-time loyalists and recent converts would also join Trudeau’s youthful team, including legions of volunteers—many of them female and, in the parlance of the day, groovy.42

  February 16, 1968—the day Trudeau announced his candidacy—was a cold and snowy Friday. The leadership campaign had already passed its halfway mark. The eight declared candidates had logged thousands of miles and shaken almost as many hands to win the support of Liberals across Canada. Polls showed that Trudeau was highly popular, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, but trailing Paul Martin nationally.

  If the newe
st Liberal contender felt any pressure to catch up to his rivals, he did not show it. At the close of his press conference, he bid the press and his advisers adieu and promptly flew off to the Laurentians for a weekend of skiing.

  Monday, February 19, appeared to be an unexceptional day in the House of Commons, except that the government benches were noticeably thin. Prime Minister Lester Pearson was on vacation in Jamaica. Another 47 of the Liberals’ 130 MPs were away, including leadership hopefuls Paul Martin, Joe Greene, and John Turner. Of the government’s top ministers, only Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau and Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp were present in the House.

  Sharp was nominally in charge when Deputy Speaker Herman Batten unexpectedly called for a vote on Bill C-193, a Liberal measure to impose an income surtax. For seventy-eight minutes, the parliamentary bells rang out. The Opposition Tories managed to scramble some of their MPs into the House for the vote, but the governing Liberals were caught flat-footed. The Liberals lost the vote 84 to 82, when the NDP, Créditistes, Socreds, and one independent MP voted with the Tories.

  Because C-193 was a money bill, the Opposition immediately launched into a chorus of “Resign!” Lester Pearson got a phone call at 10:30 p.m. from his executive assistant, Torrance Wylie, telling him breathlessly that the government had been defeated on a tax bill. “I was flabbergasted,” Pearson later recalled. “When he indicated the circumstances of our defeat, I was not only flabbergasted, I was furious.”43 Pearson roused himself at 5:30 the next morning to catch an early flight to Ottawa. He met his cabinet over lunch, conveyed his anger in no uncertain terms, and began to navigate the tricky process of retaining power. “I was not too worried about the situation politically, when I learned that it had been a snap vote,” Pearson later wrote. “It was a trap, of course, a legitimate parliamentary trick. When I heard all about this, I was concerned only with what to do. We had to refuse the demand that we resign on this vote.”44

  Pearson asked Tory leader Robert Stanfield for a twenty-four-hour adjournment of the House of Commons to allow the government some breathing room. Stanfield, to his everlasting credit as a parliamentarian and a gentleman, obliged the prime minister. Pearson took to the airwaves to tell Canadians that the vote had been merely “a hazard of minority government” and did not constitute a true defeat. He also met with his top advisers, including Pierre Trudeau, and drafted the following confidence motion: “That this House does not regard its vote in connection with third reading of Bill C-193, which had carried in all previous stages, as a vote of non-confidence in the government.” The motion was tabled in the Commons on Wednesday, February 21. A week-long brouhaha followed, Stanfield arguing that the government must resign, Pearson countering that it need not. When the dust finally settled, on February 28, the minority Liberals were sustained in power by a vote of 138 to 119—in no small measure because the Créditistes, who feared the outcome of a snap election, voted with the government.45

  Pierre Trudeau did not fare particularly well over the course of this non-confidence episode. Far from breaking party discipline or playing the renegade, the justice minister dutifully defended the prime minister’s rationale for clinging to power and voted with the government. The Globe and Mail dedicated an entire editorial to Trudeau’s apparent transformation into a party hack, calling him an “erstwhile man of principle” and accusing him of joining “the spineless Liberal herd” he had only a few years earlier excoriated.46 Other pundits noted, however, that the justice minister may have benefited both from his spirited defence of the government’s position and from the optics of taking a leadership role during the crisis. As Peter C. Newman observed, Trudeau along with John Turner and Eric Kierans had managed to project “a new style that dissociates them from the blunders of the Pearson administration.”47 Trudeau may also have benefited from having been in the House the evening the tax bill was defeated. That his rivals seemed more interested in campaigning than in governing—a perception for which Pearson had rebuked them more than once—could not have hurt him.48

  The episode appeared not to have affected Trudeau’s polling numbers. A national survey published on February 28 showed Paul Martin to be the first choice of 26 per cent of Canadians and Trudeau still lagging at 12 per cent. The same poll revealed that 16 per cent of French Canadians favoured Trudeau, in comparison with only 11 per cent of English-speaking Canadians—a dramatic revelation given the hostility of Quebec’s nationalists towards him.49 A Toronto Star survey of 164 Ontario Liberals, on the other hand, showed Trudeau with a massive lead. He was the first choice of 74 respondents, followed by the non-candidate Robert Winters at 44. Paul Martin ranked fifth with only 9 votes.50

  Winters drew the obvious conclusion. In addition to being the best-connected Liberal within the Canadian corporate elite, he now appeared to have sufficient grassroots support to take a serious run at the leadership. He would formally announce his candidacy on March 29, becoming the last of the cabinet heavyweights to join the race.

  By mutual agreement, the Liberal leadership contest had been suspended during the non-confidence imbroglio. When it became clear that the Pearson government would survive the crisis, all of the candidates revved up their campaign machines and headed onto the campaign trail for what they knew would be five weeks of hardscrabble politicking.

  The novice Pierre Trudeau had two advantages from the outset. The first was that, at Trudeau’s own insistence, his campaign would focus entirely on his own ideas and ignore what his adversaries were saying—the only exception being Quebec premier Daniel Johnson, whom Trudeau was increasingly happy to use as a foil. “The fact that he attacks me so much may prove I have a great deal of support in Quebec,” Trudeau would say of Johnson on the hustings. “It may be that he would prefer to have someone in Ottawa who cannot support the federal position as well as I can.”51 Trudeau’s second advantage was that the other candidates, with the exception of Eric Kierans and John Turner, opted to play it safe and steer clear of policy specifics in their appeals to Liberal delegates.52 The result was a Trudeau-versus-the-rest campaign, in which Trudeau spoke frankly, even amateurishly, about his policy priorities and most of the others kept to carefully scripted performances emphasizing their long experience in government and their party connections. (There were important exceptions, including John Turner’s principled efforts to put poverty on the campaign agenda.) Moreover, even as the April convention loomed, Trudeau’s rivals could not agree on the need for a common front against him.

  Whether Trudeau was advantaged by being the only French Canadian in the race is an open question. Two of his English-Canadian competitors, Kierans and Turner, were bilingual Montrealers offering special status and decentralization as the solution to Canada’s national-unity woes—precisely the formula endorsed by Daniel Johnson, Claude Ryan, and other moderate Quebec nationalists. “The prime role of the provinces must be the distribution of wealth,” Kierans would argue over the course of the campaign, “and I include authority over health, education and welfare. Some provinces may not wish to occupy all the field of social welfare. In such instances the provinces that do occupy these fields would enjoy a special status.”53 Turner would not go as far as Kierans on specifics, preferring to keep to high-minded appeals to Quebec federalists. “Quebec does, in a sense, represent the homeland of a people,” Turner would say. “You can’t treat Quebec as a province like the others. This doesn’t mean that you sell Canada down the river.”54 Hellyer, Winters, Sharp, and the fluently bilingual Martin also commanded loyalty among moderate Quebec nationalists and for exactly the same reasons. But they, too, kept mainly to platitudes rather than policy prescriptions.

  The wintry evening of February 28, Trudeau appeared before a standing-room-only crowd in Kingston, Ontario, to give the first public speech of his campaign. Kingstonians had turned out in the hundreds to get a taste of Trudeaumania, but by all accounts the candidate’s rambling talk on participatory democracy struck them as uninspired. As a stump speaker, Trudeau had not
yet reconciled the two sides of his public persona—the intellectual Trudeau who had made the mastery of politics his life’s work versus the diffident Trudeau who claimed that he had no quick fixes or magic solutions. On this evening at least, it was the latter who took to the podium. “Basically, what we try to do in government is to sit down with the people and discuss the facts of the situation and hammer out the solutions together,” he lectured his Kingston audience. “We don’t have the answers to the problems that are asked of the Canadian people today. We are trying to find them.” At a certain point, Trudeau realized that his seminar-style navel-gazing had lost the crowd. “I just better cut off here because, you know, university towns and all,” he mumbled. “I usually speak for an hour and a half.”55

  Trudeau hit his stride three days later, however, when he spoke to a packed house at Toronto’s four-hundred-seat St. Lawrence Hall. Again, the crowd was standing-room-only, “scores” of disappointed Torontonians having been turned away. “Grown men scrambled for his autograph,” said one breathless report. “Girls tugged at his stylish check suit, only to dissolve in embarrassment when he turned his smile on them.”56 Leaving little to chance, Trudeau played entirely to his own strengths, speaking mainly about Quebec’s place in Canada. During the Q & A session, he coolly took the fight directly to Premier Daniel Johnson. “He’s trying to destroy me now,” said Trudeau of the Quebec premier. “Last year, it was Marchand. Next year, it may be somebody else. Mr. Johnson claims to speak for French Canadians when he is really trying to make sure that French Canadians in Ottawa are nincompoops.”57 Asked about “special status” or “particular status,” Trudeau dismissed such ideas as “gimmicks.”58 Once more, he cautioned Canadians against imagining, however, that he intended to put Quebecers in their place. “If people think I would be a good choice for PM because I would be hard on Quebec, they had better not vote for me,” he warned.59 His warmest applause came when he answered the question, “How badly do you want to be Prime Minister?” Trudeau replied with a quotation from Plato: “A man who wants very badly to be head of the country should not be trusted.”60