Trudeaumania
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As political theatre, the debate was indeed a washout. Wearing a conservative suit and an even more conservative haircut, Trudeau spoke in a flat monotone, citing the minutiae of this or that policy study and never so much as cracking a smile. “It is true that the consumer price index over the last five years of Liberal administration have increased by 14% or thereabouts, but during the same period the disposable revenue after taxes, the take-home pay if you like, has increased by 34% . . . ,” he said of inflation. “If you compare the last five years of Liberal administration with the previous years of Conservative administration, revenues are up, productivity are up, and sales are now at an average now of some 540 billion bushels, and they were as compared to 340 . . . ,” he said of wheat production. Clearly, it was not the sort of performance for which viewers would wake the kids. Asked at one point about his omnibus bill, Trudeau could not even make fornication entertaining.
Yet over the course of the debate, Trudeau managed to reference every substantive plank in the Liberal platform. On the Watkins Report: “Our policy is not directed to the re-purchase or the recovery of those industries dominated by foreign interests, but towards the investment of Canadian savings in industries which will dominate the world of tomorrow.” On the Canadian economy: “Well, if Mr. Douglas is going to quote the report of the Economic Council, it might be worthwhile adding that they said that Canada is now going through the longest uninterrupted period of economic growth that it’s had, that exists in the history of the Canadian business cycle.” On the diplomatic recognition of China: “I’ve said, and I repeat, that the recognition of the Peking government of The People’s Republic of China is a necessity.” On Canada’s role in NATO: “I feel that we must now reassess our military participation in the defence of the free world and I feel that this should be done by, as I say, shifting the emphasis from Canadian military presence in Europe to presence in areas of continental defence.”28 For old-school Canadian viewers who had not yet embraced their inner McLuhan and were prepared to listen patiently to the party leaders, the message was still the message. And it could not have been clearer.
Three days later, Trudeau again defied conventional wisdom about how to win elections in the televisual age. Appearing at a Toronto City Hall taping of Warner Troyer’s CBC show Public Eye, he did the unthinkable for a front-running politician in the home stretch of an election race. Instead of dissembling or deflecting, he apologized for not knowing enough about some aspects of public policy to be able to comment intelligently on them. Troyer asked Trudeau what he was planning to do for indigenous peoples. “Here, like so many Canadian politicians, I don’t know enough about the Indians,” Trudeau replied. “I feel strongly the need to find solutions. I can only say it is a problem I am willing to discuss with sociologists and people who know something about it. I am sorry.”29
Later in the same interview, Trudeau alluded to the student protests then rocking Europe and North America. (In France, a student occupation at a Paris university in March 1968 had escalated by May into a massive revolt of the nation’s students and workers, paralyzing the French capital. Students in Germany, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and a host of other countries followed suit over the spring and summer of 1968. In the United States, civil-rights, free-speech, and especially anti-war demonstrations on university campuses also peaked over the summer of 1968, alongside other youth-led manifestations of New Left radicalism.)30 Troyer asked Trudeau what he was prepared to do for Canadian students. Trudeau shrugged. “I hope they don’t revolt this summer. I don’t have any means of holding them back. I don’t have a lot of money I can dish out. I am extremely worried about it.”31
While Trudeau’s aides fretted about death threats, red-baiting, and their man’s lacklustre performance on the tube, Trudeau himself was enlivening his southern Ontario campaign with antics that would have left even the Sea-Doo‒riding Stockwell Day breathless. Over lunch during a mid-June visit to Oakville, Ontario, he allowed the press to photograph him diving and swimming in the outdoor pool at the Holiday Inn. “Do a Stanfield dive,” shouted one of the journalists. Hamming it up for the cameras, Trudeau produced an awkward tumble into the pool, then repeated this display for an equally ungainly “Douglas dive.”
Awkward and ungainly were among the adjectives the press would use near the end of the campaign to describe the Tories’ and the NDP’s unravelling positions on national unity, which Trudeau continued to trumpet as the defining issue of the election and the reason for his own entry into Canadian politics. “Some say we have not promised enough things,” the prime minister stated repeatedly, “but the issue is Canada and what we are going to do with it.”32 As Peter C. Newman correctly noted, Trudeau remained willing to “gamble all” on the concept of “one nation.”33 Never did the prime minister miss an opportunity to remind Canadian voters that he alone stood against the idea of deux nations. “I pity those politicians who talk about two nations,” he said in a typical speech before a huge Markham, Ontario, crowd, which happened to include a large contingent of new Canadians. “In a political sense there is only one nation in Canada, and if we are to talk only about the English and the French, well, that would leave a lot of you gentlemen out. There are a hell of a lot of people who are not included in the two nations concept. In a sociological sense, there are a great many nations here.”34
Trudeau’s rivals did not seem to fully appreciate either the prime minister’s resolve on the national-unity question or the extent to which—amid the crisis atmosphere of early 1968—it appealed to anxious Canadian voters. Trudeau had the enormous advantage of having brought most of his own party in behind his constitutional position well before he called the election. Both the Tories and the NDP, in contrast, found themselves improvising on the national-unity question during the campaign and navigating their internal differences under Trudeau’s unforgiving gaze. The New Democrats foundered in mid-June when Quebec leader Robert Cliche casually acknowledged that he had separatists working in his organization. (“I would not refuse any separatist’s vote on Tuesday,” he would repeat defiantly right up to election day.)35 As for the Tories, they had their September 1967 deux nations policy statement to defend, along with Robert Stanfield and Marcel Faribault’s still-unresolved differences on Canadian federalism. All over the country, at their campaign stops and on radio call-in shows, Tory candidates were asked to clarify their positions. “There is no such thing as a two-nation policy,” said a visibly frustrated Dalton Camp at the end of May. “The phrase used last year at the Conservative Party’s Thinkers’ Conference at Montmorency, Quebec, was two founding peoples with the French deux nations in brackets. Any Canadian who knows the position of party leader Robert Stanfield and who also knows exactly what the Montmorency resolution said would support it.”36
Such protestations were of little use. The more Trudeau and his Liberal confrères attacked Tory policies, the more confused those policies seemed—particularly when they were defended by Marcel Faribault. Speaking to the Alberta Chamber of Commerce in Edmonton in late May, Faribault suggested that if the constitutional ideas of Quebecers and other Canadians were similar, and if they were discussed in good faith, “we shall agree very fast. If not, we shall then have to see whether there is anything more which French Canadians feel is required and which may eventually call for some particular status—to be also discussed and agreed upon.”37 Two weeks later, speaking in Jonquière, Quebec, Faribault said flatly, “What we need is a central government that will decentralize.”38
The Liberal sharks circled. In the last week of the campaign, they ran full-page ads in regional newspapers stating expressly that Robert Stanfield stood for a “two nations” version of Canada and “special status” for Quebec. Stanfield was beside himself. In a tough speech in St. Catharines, Ontario, he accused the Liberals of maliciously distorting his ideas. “Last week, full-page advertisements in different parts of the country—in Alberta and New Brunswick—sponsored by the Liberal Party contained deliberate lies abo
ut me,” he complained. “If I had to run on the record of the Liberal administration, I would try and distract attention, too, but I would not resort, I hope, to deliberate lies and, if I was ever asked to repudiate a deliberate lie made on behalf of my party, I hope I would have the courage and the decency to repudiate it.”39 The Tory leader tried yet again to clarify that his party’s concept of deux nations had a non-political meaning in French—a language in which, it had become embarrassingly clear over the course of the campaign, he was far from fluent.
Pierre Trudeau responded to Stanfield in a series of hard-hitting speeches in British Columbia. “Believe me, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t distort his position, because I don’t know what his position is,” the prime minister told a crowd of fifteen thousand in Victoria. “I know it looks like a pretty awkward one. He tries to lean over backwards to please Quebec and tries to keep a foothold in the Prairies. Now this is not a position I’m trying to distort. I would like to know, and I think the Canadian people would like to know, what that position is.”40 Continuing with the same theme at a Vancouver rally, Trudeau offered examples of Faribault’s speeches and insisted that even a “sociological” commitment to deux nations imperilled Canada since there were now many ethnic nations in the country. “Perhaps the Conservatives had better decide who is speaking for them,” he said.41 In Burnaby, Trudeau laid into the New Democrats for their attachment to deux nations. “You can’t tell lies to the people,” Trudeau admonished some NDP hecklers. “They won’t believe you. People are more sophisticated now. We are learning in this election that people don’t want to be conned by anybody. René Lévesque’s movement is supporting Robert Cliche because they feel Robert Cliche’s position is as far towards separatism as any federal party can go.”42
The volleying continued, day after day. Speaking in Hull, Quebec, on June 18, Stanfield again demanded that Trudeau “repudiate these lies.”43 Trudeau shot back the next day from a podium in Fort William, Ontario (now part of Thunder Bay). “The distressing thing is not the two-nations policy,” he joked. “It is the two-policy policy.”44
The prime minister flew into Alberta on June 19. With less than a week left in the campaign, his aides had prepped him for speeches promoting rugged individualism, free enterprise, and “fiscal responsibility.” But as journalist John Dafoe noted, “in Calgary there is only one big issue in the federal election campaign—how many nations is Canada?”45 When Trudeau spoke in Calgary and Medicine Hat, his national-unity speeches were well received, as always. And as always, the prime minister insisted that his rejection of deux nations was not a rejection of Quebecers. “We’re not waging this campaign against Quebec,” he told Albertans for the last time in the campaign. “If anyone wants to vote for our party because they think we will put Quebec in its place, they shouldn’t, because that is not my intention.”46
On Thursday, June 20, Trudeaumania reached its crescendo—just five days before Canadians would head to the polls. Trudeau’s organization could not have timed it better or staged it more adroitly.
Everywhere Trudeau had appeared over the last few weeks of the campaign, including Quebec, the crowds had numbered in the thousands. There was every reason to imagine that Torontonians would turn out in even larger numbers. Trudeau’s earliest and most enduring popular support had emerged in that city, where polls continued to show Liberals with a commanding lead. Trudeau’s organizers sensed that Torontonians would happily spend a few minutes on a beautiful spring day ducking out of their offices and classrooms to watch the Canadian prime minister cap off the most exciting election campaign in memory. And they knew that the national media headquartered in Toronto would be equally happy to beam the good vibrations out to Canadians elsewhere. Trudeau’s team had momentum on its side. But to deliver a truly once-in-a-lifetime, winner-take-all spectacle, the Liberal organizers would have to pull out all the stops. There would have to be a motorcade, and a tickertape parade, and a throng of singing children, and an open-air speech.
And that is exactly how the event played out.
Starting at Queen’s Quay at 11 a.m., a thirty-five-car motorcade crawled its way north on Bay Street towards Nathan Phillips Square on Queen. Trudeau, dressed in a blue suit, sat in a convertible limo, waving and smiling. He was accompanied by Toronto MP Donald Macdonald and surrounded by the heaviest security ever deployed to a Canadian campaign event. At the head of the motorcade was none other than Bobby Gimby, the bandleader who had written and recorded the jingle “Ca-na-da” for the Centennial Year. With Gimby were a marching band and over a hundred children and youth, who joyously belted out his signature song—which by then virtually all Canadians knew by heart, whether they liked it or not. As the parade passed the office towers on Bay Street, Trudeau was greeted by cheering Torontonians standing six rows deep. Prominent among them were Toronto business people. Onto the heads of the spectators fell tickertape and confetti wafting down from the windows above.
The drive to Nathan Phillips Square took the motorcade thirty minutes, landing the prime minister on the main stage, exactly as planned, right at the lunch hour. Estimates of the size of the crowd ranged upwards of fifty thousand, making this the largest political rally in Canadian history. Chirpy Trudeau volunteers were on hand to distribute ten thousand “Pierre” buttons.
When he took the podium, the prime minister delivered a speech on the importance of Canadian cities and the need for government to tackle urban problems. “The future of Canada will be determined in the cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver,” he told the crowd. “We know that the air we breathe is not as clear as that at the mouth of the Mackenzie River. We know that the Don and the Humber are not as pure as the Copper-Mine River.”47 It was without question the most incongruous speech of the entire campaign, given Canadians’ preoccupation with the national-unity debate. To paraphrase Ramsay Cook, somebody should have been fired for that speech. “Pierre Trudeau’s mammoth rally in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square yesterday would have been an unqualified triumph if the Prime Minister hadn’t opened his mouth,” Peter C. Newman observed. “Unhappily what this breathtaking setting inspired from the Prime Minister—the man for whom all the fuss was made—was a speech so pedestrian that if almost any other politician had made it, he would have been booed.”48 The only interesting moment in the speech came when a group of anti-war hecklers shouted “Trudeau, assassin! Trudeau, assassin!” Trudeau responded. “Pourquoi suis-je un assassin?” (Why am I an assassin?) he asked them coolly—in French.
From downtown Toronto, the prime minister was driven directly up Yonge Street to the North York Centennial Centre, where he appeared on stage with Lester Pearson for the first time in the campaign. Pearson introduced Trudeau to the crowd of 6,500 with such warmth that the candidate himself was visibly choked up. “A French-speaking citizen of Quebec, but above all that, a Canadian,” cheered Pearson. “A man prepared to speak out loud and clear in favor of unity. A man who doesn’t make idle promises. A man who believes that the proof of the pudding is more important than pie in the sky. A man for today and a man for tomorrow. My friend, my former colleague, a man for all Canada—Pierre Elliott Trudeau!”49 Trudeau followed with a short speech praising Canadians for their exemplary engagement in the political process. But it was Pearson who stole the show.
Trudeau finished off the headiest day of his campaign with an evening speech before a crowd of ten thousand at Scarborough’s Confederation Park. In one of the most interesting twists in a campaign that had been full of them, Trudeau acknowledged that his party had overplayed the Stanfield–Faribault schism. He told the Scarborough crowd that he had read in the press that Stanfield called him “an accomplice in the smear campaign.” Trudeau said he took the Tory leader at his word that he did not stand for a two-nations Canada, as some Liberal campaign ads had claimed. “I repudiate such advertisements and I understand they have been discontinued.”50 The prime minister’s “repudiation” was front-page news across Canada the next day—far more
prominent, in fact, than the saturation coverage of Trudeaumania hitting Toronto. Stanfield himself went on record as saying that he accepted Trudeau’s apology (though, of course, that word had never been used).
The prime minister’s magnanimity towards Robert Stanfield did not extend to Marcel Faribault, however, who continued to state that he would decentralize Canada in order to make Quebec’s demands palatable to the other provinces. While Trudeau’s motorcade had been making its way up Bay Street in Toronto, Faribault was speaking at a luncheon hosted by a Montreal Kiwanis Club. There, he called once again for a new Constitution, to stand as “a pact of good faith between two founding nations.”51 By the time Trudeau appeared in Scarborough that evening, he had been apprised of Faribault’s speech. No sooner had he repudiated the slur against Stanfield than Trudeau again prodded the Tories’ conflicted policy on Quebec. “In fairness to us,” said Trudeau, “I would like the Tories themselves to say what they do stand for.”52