Trudeaumania
Page 25
Some Quebec pundits, including Claude Ryan, expressed the hope early in the election campaign that Faribault would run in Quebec as a Tory. (Robert Stanfield approached Ryan himself about running as a Conservative candidate, but he declined.) On May 8, the story leaked that Stanfield was indeed holding private talks with Faribault. Less than a week later, on May 14, Stanfield confirmed happily that Faribault had agreed to run as a Progressive Conservative. Faribault would bring the Tories prestige, money, and as many as thirty-five seats in Quebec, according to his own prognostications.25 But he also brought his own ideas about Quebec, which Stanfield knew were incompatible with his own. The news that Faribault would run as a Tory was not a day old before Stanfield admitted publicly that he and Faribault did not see eye to eye on national unity issues and thus had agreed to sit down together to hammer out a consensus position.26
Tommy Douglas and the NDP were also prepared at the outset of the contest to fight Trudeau on Quebec. “It has become apparent that Mr. Trudeau wishes to avoid at all costs an issue-oriented campaign,” said Douglas. “He wishes to ride the crest of publicity resulting from the Liberal leadership convention and to avoid squarely confronting the major problems besetting the nation.”27 Speaking in Toronto in late April, NDP candidate (and now party vice-president) Charles Taylor told one hundred party faithful that Trudeau’s public image had been “manufactured”—but not by Trudeau himself. There would be little left of his “magic aura” once his hardline views on national unity became better known, Taylor asserted. “What he’s putting forward would be terrible for the country.”28 Robert Cliche, Quebec NDP leader, would speak unabashedly throughout the campaign of deux nations, condemning Trudeau as “the greatest obstacle” to Canadian unity. “Mr. Trudeau refuses to admit there is a constitutional problem, and he also refuses to admit that Quebec is spokesman for French Canada,” said Cliche. “Quebec will never allow an iron hand, directed by a hard head, to wring its neck. It is regrettable that the prime minister refuses to consider any compromise.”29
Trudeau plainly relished having the likes of Stanfield, Faribault, Douglas, and Cliche as adversaries. He even tried to goad Daniel Johnson into the election fight, claiming later that he had failed because the Quebec premier was too savvy to risk “a humiliating defeat.”30 As for Faribault, his nomination brought much-needed clarity to the campaign, said Trudeau, since the Tories and the NDP were now proposing the same deux nations policy. It was an “acid test,” he said. “In Quebec they are talking about two-nations and about special status, and in the rest of the country they are talking about one nation and no special status—and they think the Canadian people do not know about this. They think the Canadian people are going to be fooled by this type of line. You have to tell the same thing in all parts of the country, and that is what the Canadian people want.”31
Interestingly, Réal Caouette, leader of the Ralliement créditiste, played only a minor role in the campaign’s national-unity debate. Known as a staunch Quebec nationalist and a formidable stump speaker, Caouette was popular in small-c conservative, rural Quebec. Out on the campaign trail, the plain-speaking Créditiste leader would echo some of Trudeau’s views on Canadian federalism. Those who wished for “special status” did not even know what it was, Caouette told a Quebec City crowd in mid-May. “It is time to get rid of our blowhard mentality, to start thinking about a strong Quebec within the framework of a Canadian constitution and to start living in the world of today.”32 On social policy, however, the Créditiste leader worked rural Quebecers against Trudeau’s liberal tendencies. Many were already suspicious of his reforms on homosexuality and abortion, and even more were unhappy with his critique of Quebecers’ “lousy” French.33
The moment Trudeau dissolved Parliament, the Liberal Party machine lurched into campaign mode. A small policy committee chaired by Jim Davey was struck to hammer out the platform on which Liberal candidates would campaign. Its leading lights were Marc Lalonde, who continued to serve as Trudeau’s chief policy adviser, and Bill Lee, who was promoted to policy adviser while retaining his job as Trudeau’s tour manager. Joining the team were several young intellectuals, including the Princeton-trained Ph.D. Lloyd Axworthy, who had supported Turner during the leadership race. At Lalonde’s request, Ramsay Cook joined Trudeau’s staff as a part-time troubleshooter and speech writer. “My special assignment,” Cook later recalled, “was the constitution, watching for Robert Stanfield and Marcel Faribault or Tommy Douglas and Robert Cliche to contradict each other. The wait was not long.”34 There was never any doubt about who would be the final arbiter of Liberal policy: Pierre Trudeau himself.
In mid-May, Peter C. Newman would leak the existence of a secret Liberal document setting out eighty promises that party candidates could make while campaigning. The 160-page Liberal Candidates’ Handbook, a copy of which is today archived among the Trudeau papers in Ottawa, left no doubt about Trudeau’s or the party’s priorities. The first eight pages identified national unity as the country’s major challenge and celebrated Trudeau as the drafter and defender of a charter of rights guaranteeing language rights across Canada. The four official themes of the campaign—The Just Society, A Prosperous Economy, A United Canada, and Canada in the World—followed from this premise.35 When Trudeau publicly unveiled the abridged version of the Liberal Party platform in Moncton, New Brunswick, in late May, it derived almost verbatim from the eighty-point program outlined in the secret handbook.36
There was never any doubt about the campaign’s overarching strategy. After the dramatic leadership campaign and the adulation that the winner had inspired, the campaign would centre almost exclusively on Trudeau himself. On posters, banners, and postcards, voters would see one motif endlessly repeated: Trudeau’s face in grey-scale, against a flat red background, accompanied by the text “Pierre” or “Trudeau,” or sometimes just the party logo, a stylized capital L cradling a maple leaf. This was a tried-and-true Liberal branding strategy, as earlier campaign posters for Louis St. Laurent, Joey Smallwood, and others had demonstrated. One sixties-style variation on this motif showed a headshot of Trudeau in high-contrast black and white—an obvious nod to the iconic and by then ubiquitous Alberto Korda photograph of Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara.
Trudeau kicked off his campaign tour in Vancouver on May 10, speaking at a dinner for forestry-industry executives. As he had done during the leadership contest, he would use his public appearances to roll out individual planks of his platform. On this occasion, he told British Columbian business leaders that he was serious about recognizing China, and that he expected them to play a critical role in strengthening the trade relationships that would bring that country out of its diplomatic isolation. “The present situation in which a government which represents a quarter of the world’s population is diplomatically isolated even from countries with which it is actively trading is obviously unsatisfactory,” he said.37 Trudeau also took the opportunity, as he would throughout the campaign, to drive home the idea that no province’s interests were distinct from the national interest. “British Columbia must not develop in isolation from the rest of the country as a centrifugal force pulling against national unity,” he said.38 Press coverage of Trudeau followed exactly as his campaign organizers had hoped. A Canadian Press photo of Trudeau chatting with a radiant Jackie Kennedy lookalike made the nation’s front pages, accompanied by the caption “Trudeaumania Hit Vancouver.” Women “of all shapes and sizes” swarmed Trudeau at the banquet, according to the many stories that followed, demanding kisses and autographs.39
On May 13, Trudeau met United Nations secretary-general U Thant in Edmonton for extensive private talks. Thant was in the Canadian city to participate in the spring convocation of University of Alberta students, where both he and Trudeau would receive honourary degrees. The UN chief used the visit to call for an unconditional halt of the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam as a prelude to a negotiated peace (the first of the Paris peace talks having taken place just days earl
ier, on May 10). Trudeau’s message was the same. “The bombing of the north must stop immediately,” he insisted. “It must stop fully, not merely nine-tenths or three-quarters, but totally. That is a precondition to fruitful peace talks in our opinion.”40 Trudeau also laid out his views on what would later be called North‒South relations. “We must recognize that, in the long run, the overwhelming threat to Canada will not come from foreign investments, or foreign ideologies or even—with good fortune—from foreign nuclear weapons,” he said. “It will come instead from the two-thirds of the peoples of the world who are steadily falling further and farther behind in their search for a decent standard of living. We are faced with an overwhelming challenge. In meeting it the world must be our constituency.”41
The Liberal campaign shifted to Quebec two days later, when Trudeau gave his signature “Just Society” speech, written by Ramsay Cook. Speaking to an audience of 1,200 at the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, Trudeau attacked Marcel Faribault’s deux nations theory and Daniel Johnson’s demand for an independent voice in international relations. If nationalists like Faribault and Johnson got their way, said Trudeau, not only would Canada likely disappear but so, too, might the United Nations and other international bodies. “When Canada’s participation is sought for an international conference, there is only one address for the invitation—Ottawa,” Trudeau maintained. “The Maple Leaf Flag is not a federal flag—it is the flag of Canada. French Canadians are represented at Ottawa and if you do not like their work, you can throw them out in the election. But under the two-nation concept, there will be nobody to represent you at Ottawa.”42
Robert Stanfield responded immediately to Trudeau’s attack on Faribault, accusing the prime minister of the worst kind of opportunism. “The attempt by Mr. Trudeau to gain support by dividing the country, and by trying to turn English Canada against Quebec, raises very serious questions,” said the Tory leader. “This is a dangerous game Mr. Trudeau is playing. He is playing with the future of Canada.”43 In turn, appearing on Ottawa’s CJOH television station on May 17, Trudeau condemned Stanfield for mistaking the views of Daniel Johnson and Marcel Faribault for those of ordinary Quebecers. “This isn’t Quebec,” he said. “Quebec is—we will see this in the election—Canadians of all origins, but mainly French, who believe that Canada is their land and their home, and they want their representatives in Ottawa to speak for Quebec in international affairs. Mr. Johnson is elected by Quebecers to speak for provincial affairs, not federal affairs and certainly not international affairs. You can’t have it both ways.”44 To Stanfield’s suggestion that Trudeau stop criticizing Daniel Johnson, with whom, presumably, he would eventually have to negotiate a new constitutional arrangement, Trudeau was equally dismissive. “What does he want us to do, lie down while Mr. Johnson says that he is establishing precedents? So what we should do to please Mr. Stanfield is not to react to this, say nothing? If the people want to have us wither away the federal government, they had better vote for somebody else. They had better not vote for me.”45
In mid-May, three weeks into the campaign, Trudeau spoke at length with George Bain of the Globe and Mail. The two men met at the prime minister’s official summer residence at Harrington Lake. Bain started by asking Trudeau whether he thought he was taking a risk in standing up to Quebec nationalists. “Well, politics is a gamble,” Trudeau replied. “But it is really a continuation, once again, of why I entered politics—because I felt that there was a real menace to Confederation if people did not stand up and stand for a united Canada, particularly in my province. We do not want to be [in Ottawa] to be stooges; we do not want to be straw men. If we cannot speak as fully for the people of Quebec in federal matters as other ministers can speak for their constituencies and their provinces, then the game is ended. I would rather know now, because I will get out of federal politics. I will go home and I will do something else.”46
Bain then asked Trudeau what he meant by the phrase Just Society, which had emerged as the Liberals’ pre-eminent campaign slogan. “It means certain things in a legal sense,” said Trudeau, “freeing an individual so he will be rid of his shackles and permitted to fulfill himself in society in the way which he judges best, without being bound up by standards of morality which have nothing to do with law and order but which have to do with prejudice and religious superstition. That is one aspect of it. Another aspect of it is economic. The just society for them means permitting the province or the region as a whole to have a developing economy.”
Why did Trudeau believe Quebec nationalism was incompatible with the concept of a just society? Bain asked.
Let me just say that my approach to nationalism—Quebec nationalism or Canadian nationalism, or any other—is that, to me, it is a right-wing approach because it tends to set the standards for state action, things such as ethnic or linguistic or even religious norms. To me the modern state must smooth away such types of exclusive norms. You are born white or you are born black—all right. Or you embrace one religion or another. Or you are of one ethnic origin or another. But the state should try to govern everybody well—the greatest good of the greatest number. If we have two nations in Canada, as my opponents say, it means we are going to have two states and the values of those states will be based on the idea of one or of the other nation, and this is what I reject.47
The campaign had barely begun when it became obvious that—even apart from Quebec—the Tories had a PR problem. If Trudeau was, as Lester Pearson had said, a man for tomorrow, Stanfield came across as a man for yesterday. The Canadian Annual Review would later call the Tory campaign “indolent and sloppy.”48 Even sympathetic observers like Globe and Mail correspondent (and Stanfield biographer) Geoffrey Stevens conceded that virtually everything about the Tories seemed old-fashioned. “Stanfield lumbered from city to city in a decaying old DC-7C that had spent its best years lugging American tourists to Japan and Canadian Legionnaires to London,” Stevens wrote. “It had a cruising speed of three hundred miles per hour—barely half the speed of Trudeau’s DC-9—and Stanfield always seemed to be an hour or more behind schedule.”49
As for Stanfield, his public image as a square could not be rehabilitated by the corny campaign slogan he poached from Laugh-In, “Sock it to them!” According to one of the campaign’s most memorable saws, “It’s impossible to imagine Trudeau as an old man, and it’s impossible to imagine Stanfield as a young one.” By mid-campaign, the press had taken to calling the Tory leader “Silent Bob.” As one typical report remarked, “Just about everywhere he’s been during the election campaign, Stanfield has been the same—withdrawn, unspontaneous and a puzzle to people meeting him for the first time.” In contrast with Trudeau and his “see-and-touch” approach, Stanfield was awkward and tongue-tied around ordinary Canadians.50 On television, his chops were even worse. Commenting on Stanfield’s performance during an interview with CBC’s Patrick Watson, TV critic Roy Shields said he gave the impression “of a dispirited man beginning to have regrets he ever left Nova Scotia.”51 The only thing Stanfield had working for him, added Shields, was sympathy.
Trudeau’s campaign organizers took full advantage, planning shorter and more numerous campaign stops to maximize the impact of their candidate’s charisma. On May 18, Trudeau blitzed Toronto, dropping by helicopter into three shopping malls (at Jane and Wilson, Jane and Bloor, and the Lakeshore) and capping off his tour with an appearance at the Royal York Hotel. At each stop, he was greeted by large crowds and mobbed by young women seeking kisses and autographs. He made short speeches, posing for photo ops with local Liberal candidates and smitten fans. Three days later, Trudeau made a similar splash in southwestern Ontario. Seated in an open convertible Cadillac, he visited six towns (Mitchell, Seaforth, Clinton, Blyth, Wingham, and Listowel) in five hours. Hundreds of people lined the streets to see him, including the usual retinue of screaming fans. In Listowel, Trudeau spoke about the need for the Canadian government to live within its means. “Governments are not Santa Claus,” he
said. “What Ottawa gives to the people it must take from the people. We don’t intend raising taxes any more than we have to and, therefore, we aren’t making many promises this election. But we do promise one thing, and that is that all the people of the country will have the right to share the wealth of this country.”52
Speaking at a whistle stop in Brantford, Ontario, in late May, Trudeau again positioned himself as a frugal fiscal conservative. “People expect more from the country,” he said. “They expect more from the government. Well, we’re not going around telling the people that the government will give them more and give great public works here and build a tunnel there and increase all benefits in the next place. We are saying that the revolution of rising expectations can be a danger to Canada if the people think governments have money of their own and they can give things away that don’t cost the people anything.”53 By all accounts, Trudeau’s message was extremely well received by rural voters. Reporters travelling with him observed that he had impressed even the most conservative Ontario farmers as a straight shooter. “He seems to be able to make up his mind and he knows what he wants,” said one. “He’s a frank, stubborn, independent type of guy, like us. We’ve had enough of this free stuff.”54
Throughout the campaign, Tommy Douglas tried to corner Trudeau on the issue of foreign direct investment in Canada. (Douglas stated early in the race that because of critically high levels of foreign ownership, Canada was within a decade of losing its sovereignty.)55 “He’s a continentalist,” Douglas said of Trudeau. “He makes no bones about it. He talks about a continental economic entity and that eventually means one political entity, dominated by the United States.”56 Halfway through the campaign, Douglas stated publicly that federal finances were a mess and the Liberals were covering it up. Trudeau responded directly. “The government is not broke, but the government, if it wants to have a sound dollar, must sustain a balanced budget,” he said. “We have a balanced budget and it’s going to stay that way.”57 Speaking on a Vancouver radio show in late May, Douglas countered. “When he talks of balancing the budget, he sounds to me just like a 1930s Tory,” he said of Trudeau. “Why, even R.B. Bennett got over that balanced budget stuff.”58 A few days later, Douglas compared Trudeau’s economic policies to those of American conservatives. “I though Barry Goldwater and former President Eisenhower were the only two people left who thought you combat inflation by balancing the budget,” Douglas told a Windsor crowd, little appreciating—or perhaps caring—that painting Trudeau as a fiscal conservative made him more appealing to centre-right voters.59