The Tories, too, went after Trudeau in late May, particularly on the Constitution. On May 20, Marcel Faribault held a press conference in which he stated that he thought the Canadian Constitution could be reformed “before the end of the year.” After all, he observed, the Americans had written their Constitution in three months, “and they had to start from scratch.” A journalist asked Faribault to comment on Trudeau’s hard line on the Constitution. “I wish he had said what he says now at the time when I was his constitutional law teacher at the University of Montreal,” he replied. Did he support special status for Quebec? “I don’t particularly relish that term myself,” Faribault said, “but in reality Quebec has had a special status since Confederation. I am deeply convinced that the other provinces will not want for themselves any other status than that wanted by the province of Quebec.”60
The next day Faribault joined Stanfield at a rally at Winnipeg’s Civic Auditorium. Speaking before a crowd of 4,500, Faribault said he had come to Winnipeg to set the record straight. “There is not one square inch of this country I shall ever renounce and there is no one I will not fight who seeks to menace or tear it apart,” he cheered.61 When Stanfield took the podium, he mused about the possibility of a moratorium on discussion of the Constitution for the rest of the campaign. “We feel we have discussed it enough, and made our point,” said Stanfield. “We stand for a united Canada.” Asked to elaborate on his views of Canadian federalism, Stanfield stated his position. “The Progressive Conservative Party stands for one country, one Canada with a federal system of government, one country of ‘two founding peoples’ who have been joined by Canadians of other cultures. Neither I, as the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, nor the party itself, accept any suggestion of ‘two countries’ or ‘two Canadas.’”62
Trudeau answered the Tory leader the next day. There would be no moratorium. On the contrary, Stanfield’s offer allowed Trudeau both to restate that the election was about national unity and to accuse the Tories of playing Canadians for fools. On May 22, Trudeau spoke at his own nomination meeting in the Montreal riding of Mount Royal. A standing-room-only crowd of 700 was there to see him, and another 1,500 stood in the street to listen to him on loudspeakers. Trudeau did not disappoint them. “I’ve been told that in taking the problems of the country to the people, by asking them to think about the constitution and about federalism, that I am making a mistake,” he said. “Are they too dumb? Are they afraid to face realities? I don’t agree with that.”63
Speaking in Timmins the same evening, Faribault retaliated. Trudeau was a “socialist in disguise and a socialist of the worst kind—a doctrinaire socialist,” Faribault claimed. “I have known him for 25 years. He was a student of mine at the University of Montreal, and a good student I might say. But he is basically a socialist.”64
Trudeau reacted to Faribault’s red-baiting by playing the statesman. “Look behind labels,” he told a Canadian Club luncheon in Winnipeg the next day. “Don’t judge a man by the labels other men put on him or by the thickness of his pocket book or by the thinness of his hair, but by his ideas.”65
Out on the campaign trail, Trudeau was at his best where he always had been, challenging idealistic young Canadians and being challenged in turn by them. On May 23, he gave a speech to a group of students in Winnipeg, sparring with them in his familiar Socratic manner. (At one point, he told the crowd that he was enjoying himself so much that he would be happy to arrive late to his plane.) One exchange in particular captured Trudeau’s sharp-witted debating style. It opened when a student shouted, “What about Vietnam?”
“It is a dirty war and it should be stopped,” Trudeau replied. “It has long been the policy of the Canadian government to stop the war. But it must be ended through negotiation, not by bombing the north.”
“Then why does the Canadian government continue to sell arms to the United States?” countered the student.
“What difference would it make if we stopped selling arms to the United States?” said Trudeau. “If you really want to do something to stop this war, we can stop selling wheat to China.”
The students groaned.
“Well, why not?” Trudeau continued. “China has a little something to do with this war. And at the same time we can stop selling oil to the United States. And asbestos. And nickel.”
“This is precisely what the federal government should do,” said the student.
“Then where’s our money going to come from?” Trudeau pressed him. “Oh, you might feel better. But you’re not just pouring balm on your consciences. You’d have a fine world if every time you didn’t agree with the foreign policy of a foreign state you decided to blockade it. We’d have to blockade France. And, of course, the British. Nobody approves of what they’re doing in South Africa. And the rest of Europe. So, what would you do? You’d have clean hands. You’d have pure hands. You wouldn’t be selling anything to these awful bums, eh? You’d have empty bellies and you’d be flat on your face and you’d have a prostrate economy.”
When one of the students asked an ill-informed question, Trudeau reached into his pocket, threw out a dime, and said, “Go buy a newspaper and learn something.” The crowd howled with laughter.66
Not all of Trudeau’s encounters with young people were pleasant. On May 27, he confronted a group of young separatists who showed up at Fort Chambly, south of Montreal, to heckle him. “What are you afraid of?” he said angrily. “You are afraid that the country is no longer interested in your small minds and small ideas.” What really enraged Trudeau was that some of the hecklers had brought along English signs saying “Get the frogs to speak English,” among other anti-French slogans. “These are agents provocateurs,” he told the crowd, “separatists pretending they are English in order to create hate in this country.”67
Trudeau’s exchanges with young activists, pleasant or otherwise, countered the popular perception that his rapport with Canadian youth was shallow or manufactured—but never completely. Everywhere he went, journalists happily reported on the many teenagers who showed up looking for autographs. “Canadian kids have found a new kick—politics,” said a typical report. “It beats LSD, glue-sniffing, Beatles and transcendental meditation.”68 The condescension in such coverage was palpable—and, of course, insulting to the many young Canadians who took Trudeau and the issues of the day seriously. Occasionally, the teenyboppers themselves fired back with op-eds of their own, bearing titles like the Toronto Star’s “I’m a Teenage Liberal Because I Care about the Constitution.”69 Trudeau was delighted.
By late May, the Liberal “kiss-and-run” campaign began to feel contrived—even to the candidate himself. At Kentville, Nova Scotia, Trudeau flew in by helicopter, gave a three-minute speech, allowed himself to be touched and jostled for another fifteen minutes, and then promptly flew out. For those in the crowd who had travelled for hours to see him, or might have preferred that he talk about issues, the performance was off-putting. The criticism that Trudeau was a “candy-floss candidate” began to dog him, alongside the persistent refrain from his Quebec critics that he enjoyed playing the messiah. “The Trudeau campaign is, in effect, a throwaway when you think of the man’s intellectual capacities and the range of his mind as demonstrated before he committed himself to the role of the showbiz campaign, showing himself to the hero-hungry people,” fumed veteran Ottawa Citizen correspondent Charles Lynch. “Mr. Trudeau is seeking to win the prime ministry without ever demonstrating, or needing to demonstrate, his qualifications for that office.”70
The venerable Globe and Mail columnist Scott Young—father of folksinger Neil Young and a man who knew something about the counterculture—was also unimpressed with Trudeaumania.
The most difficult thing for a born-innocent bystander to understand about the federal election campaign is what moves women and young girls especially to flock around Pierre Trudeau, throw themselves upon him, press their bosoms against him, act out in all ways a human parody of reason. Have any
of them read his books or speeches? Would any of them act as they do if Mr. Trudeau had married and now had a wife of his own age, a settled, motherly or even grandmotherly woman whose natural progression from girlhood could be measured in the steadily rising quality required in her foundation garments? Are Canadian women so starved for romance that they will seize any opportunity to carry their yearnings into the polling booth with them? It is all a puzzle to me.71
Trudeau’s female supporters, and the prime minister himself, recognized that Young’s critique contained as much condescension as puzzlement.
The more the press covered Trudeumania, in fact, the more Trudeau fretted about being overexposed. “I hope Trudeau doesn’t get in,” remarked a twenty-four-year-old woman at a Tory rally in Halifax. “I don’t know what I have against him but he’s just not the type of person to be in such a high position. You know, this business of kissing all the girls all the time. I would have liked to see him do something before calling an election.”72 In Quebec, where Trudeau refused to conceal his views or placate his political enemies, Trudeaumania was plainly a liability. “So you think this Trudeaumania is real?” a Union Nationale organizer pressed Toronto Star correspondent Dominique Clift. “Well, I’ll tell you that it’s no more spontaneous than the reception which de Gaulle got last year on Le Chemin du Roy. And I know. De Gaulle. Trudeau. Bah! It’s all newspaper and television stuff. You do it with kids out of school with no vote.”73
In early June, Trudeau put a stop to the kiss-and-run campaign, insisting that his visits be longer and that he be allowed to speak on substantive issues with Canadians. As if to atone for his spotty appearances in Atlantic Canada, on June 3 Trudeau settled in to a major speech on national unity before an open-air crowd of eight thousand in Kamloops, B.C.—a speech that even his critics acknowledged was one of the most inspired of the campaign. His voice rising, his forefinger stabbing, Trudeau charged Marcel Faribault with opening up the question of special status for Quebec and other Tories with conveniently distancing themselves from Faribault. “They are talking about two nations in one part of the country and now they think it is time to make the rest of the country forget about it,” said Trudeau. “Our policy is clear and simple—all Canada belongs to all Canadians!”74 Before he left the podium, Trudeau apologized for getting carried away and talking too long. When he left the stage, he was mobbed on his way to get a burger. Ian MacDonald, the Vancouver Sun’s reporter on the campaign trail, would later claim that for Westerners Trudeaumania began at that Kamloops picnic.75
Despite the evidence that Trudeau benefited politically from the adulation of young women, he and his advisers understood that the slightest whiff of scandal could be disastrous. Asked by journalists about all the kissing at his campaign stops, Trudeau suggested defensively that it was a harmless expression of young people’s political engagement. “I’d much rather see them do that [kiss] than see them withdraw from society,” he told CBC’s Patrick Watson. “Real kissing is something I don’t like to do in public.”76 Ottawa bureaucrats remained as risk-averse as ever. In late May, Jennifer Rae, a pretty twenty-four-year-old (and sister of Bob Rae), was asked to leave her job in the PMO because Trudeau had been seeing her socially. (Rae had been Trudeau’s date to a state dinner in early May for President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia.) She was relocated to Liberal Party headquarters in Ottawa, reportedly under protest.77
Just after midnight local time on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., brother of the late—and in Canada revered—JFK was shot down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Senator Kennedy had just finished speaking to a crowd of supporters that had gathered to celebrate his victory over Senator Eugene McCarthy in the California presidential primary. He was hit with three bullets from a .22-calibre revolver fired by Sirhan Sirhan, a Jordanian unhappy with Kennedy’s pro-Israeli stand on the Middle East. Like their American friends, Canadians awakened the next morning to the shocking news that Kennedy had undergone four hours of emergency neurosurgery to remove one of the assassin’s bullets from his brain. He was clinging to life at L.A.’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, had been with him when he was shot and remained by his side. Jackie Kennedy, JFK’s widow, was said to be “terribly shaken” and making her way from New York to L.A., as was his brother Senator Edward Kennedy.
Pierre Trudeau, still touring Western Canada, was awakened in his Edmonton bed by his friend and press secretary Roméo LeBlanc the moment the U.S. TV networks began broadcasting the story. The prime minister was “deeply shocked and horrified,” LeBlanc told the press, but this description turned out to be an understatement. Trudeau took an early flight to Montreal for the funeral of his friend André Laurendeau, where his already anxious mood was exacerbated by the presence of Quebec nationalists. Immediately after the funeral, he flew to Sudbury, Ontario, for a campaign stop that had been on the books for weeks. In his pocket was a speech on resource policy that Ramsay Cook had written. And in his pocket it would stay.
On that night, Trudeau spoke to the Sudbury crowd of six thousand entirely extemporaneously. The normally reserved prime minister was racked with emotion, and it showed. “I do hope that in this election we will use the weeks and days remaining ahead to us to remind each other and to remind our politicians and to remind our columnists and commentators, to remind everyone whose part it is to discuss the issues of the future of Canada, that if we can’t do it with the language of reason—if they must appeal in the language of civil discord and passion—we should be ashamed to be Canadians that have no right to live in peace together.” Trudeau appealed directly to Canadians not to “tolerate those who speak with a language of hate and violence to achieve what they think is justice for their ideas,” citing recent FLQ bombings in Montreal as an example. Canada was fortunate not to be experiencing the extremist violence of the United States, he said, but it was easy to imagine such incidents escalating. “Frenchman Go Home, Damn Communist, or Bloody Fascist”—these were some of the epithets he had heard on the campaign trail, he told the crowd. “This is not the kind of dialogue on which a civilization is built.”78
Journalists travelling with Trudeau noted that there was no heckling during his Sudbury speech. Again, his words seemed to strike exactly the right note. When Trudeau left the podium, Lester Pearson called Marc Lalonde to say that it was the finest political speech he had ever heard.
Medical interventions could not save Kennedy’s life. He died just before 2 a.m. Los Angeles time on June 6. Pierre Trudeau kept to his campaign itinerary and gave a speech in Rouyn, Quebec, that mournful evening. He was no longer philosophical about the violence that had taken Kennedy’s life. He was angry, and bitterly so. When a group of young people in the crowd of 1,500 began heckling him, Trudeau was merciless. They shouted “Vive le Québec libre!” Trudeau hit back with “Vive le Canada libre!” When they tried to drown out his speech with chants of “Un, deux, trois, boo!” and “Vive Caouette!” Trudeau assumed his gunslinger pose, with his hands on his hips and his feet planted wide apart, and lashed out. “You can have your free Quebec but what about your freedom of speech? You are giving an example of the kind of country we would have if your party came to power. There would be no freedom of speech in your Québec libre. You are conducting yourselves like tramps and you want to run the affairs of this province?” Then came the coup de grâce. “Senator Kennedy was killed by purveyors of hate like you!”79 Trudeau was more furious at that moment than Canadians had ever seen him. Even the young acolytes who shouted “Vive Trudeau!” during his speech annoyed him visibly.
Many ordinary Canadians, particularly those who could recall the terrible events in Dallas in November 1963, were distressed by the news that Bobby Kennedy was dead. This was no time for one-upmanship in the Canadian election campaign, and everyone knew it. Robert Stanfield expressed disbelief along with his condolences for the beleaguered Kennedy family. “A young man of proven ability, confidence and courage, obviously dedicat
ed to the service of his country, and somebody shoots him down,” said Stanfield. “There is something deeply disturbing to me about the spread of violence in the Western world. It is senseless. It threatens the whole basis of our society.”80
The most immediate impact of the Kennedy murder was that protecting the life of the Canadian prime minister suddenly became a national obsession. Out on the campaign trail, Trudeau had until then been guarded by two plainclothes RCMP officers, who accompanied him on his stump speeches and slept in rooms adjoining his at night. The prime minister’s obvious enjoyment of large and sometimes pushy crowds—and indeed his Kennedy-like habit of riding in open Cadillacs—made the duties of his security detail challenging. More than once in the first few weeks of the campaign, Trudeau’s admirers had come close to dragging him off the back seat of his convertible limo.
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