Trudeaumania

by Robert Wright

  Several days earlier, Stanfield and Faribault had been photographed touring small-town Quebec together in a pontoon helicopter. On one pontoon the name “Stanfield” appeared, and on the other, “Faribault.” Trudeau knew a gift horse when he saw one. “Let’s just say in this last week of the campaign that the Tories have a two-pontoon policy,” he told the cheering Scarborough crowd.53

  Surprisingly, perhaps, for a campaign in which media appeared to play a decisive role, fifty-nine of ninety-nine Canadian Press outlets surveyed by CP during the final week identified themselves as officially neutral. Of those taking a partisan stand, twenty-three endorsed Trudeau and the Liberals. Seventeen came out in favour of Stanfield and the Tories.

  The Toronto Star endorsed Trudeau—solely, it claimed, for the tenacity with which he defended national unity.

  Apart from any other political virtues, the Prime Minister’s clear-cut stand on the paramount issue of English-French relations entitles him, in the Star’s judgment, to the support of the Canadian people. Mr. Trudeau is determined there shall be only “one Canada” with equality for all provinces and special status for none. But he is firm, as well, in the belief that French-speaking Canadians should have the right to use their own language everywhere in the country where their numbers warrant it. This is a clear, precise policy on a matter of fundamental importance to the future of Canada, a policy which in our view is preferable to the fuzzy doubletalk of the Conservatives and NDP.54

  Three days later, as if to drive home the point, the Star ran an editorial entitled “Where Do the Tories Stand on Quebec?”55

  The Globe and Mail endorsed Trudeau as well, for his record on “the relationship of the individual to the state” and his “disarming candor.” The paper quoted a recent statement by former prime minister Lester B. Pearson. “I feel happy leaving the country and the Government of Canada in his hands,” Pearson said of Trudeau. “I think of him as a very wise, mature, intelligent patriot. He has been loyal to the language, the culture and the traditions of Quebec but he has put above all of that his loyalty to Canada. Everything’s going to be all right and I can sit back and enjoy my retirement.” That, said the Globe, was certainly good enough for Canadians.56

  In a second, powerful editorial published on June 21, the Globe hammered the Tories’ star Quebec candidate.

  Marcel Faribault has said he wants no special status for Quebec. He just wants broad powers to be offered to all the provinces in the conviction that only Quebec would accept them. That could produce a special status for Quebec that would go far beyond anything we could accept—or anything, we suspect, that Mr. Stanfield could accept. Mr. Faribault also believes that Ottawa should be allowed only those powers the provinces wish it to have, and that the provinces should be entitled to establish sovereign international personalities in areas of their exclusive jurisdiction. Mr. Stanfield doesn’t agree and has said so (there really do seem to be two Conservative pontoons). We don’t agree either: we think such measures would shatter Canada. That is why we support Prime Minister Trudeau.57

  Many of the English-Canadian news outlets that did not endorse specific candidates expressed appreciation that the campaign had been fought over serious issues by serious candidates. “No matter who forms the next government in Ottawa, the federal position has been made firmer as a result of the national debate,” stated the Winnipeg Tribune. “Neither Quebec nor any other province will be able to push Ottawa around as has been the case in recent years. The campaign has had another salutary by-product—the difference between linguistic rights and provincial constitutional rights has been brought out into the open. It has been made clear that no province can make a valid claim of being the ‘motherland’ of any language group.”58

  In Quebec, meanwhile, the pundits remained as polarized as ever. Late in the campaign, thirteen prominent provincial Liberals, including Pierre Laporte, signed a statement of support for Trudeau. “We know our positions well enough so that we could hope to meet and discuss frankly with the hope of finding grounds for agreement,” Laporte said of his friend Trudeau. “Out of respect for the intelligence of Québécois, out of respect for a man who frankly states his ideas, even if I don’t accept them all, I will vote Trudeau on June 25.”59

  The Quebec press, on the other hand, swung almost uniformly against the prime minister. The English-language Montreal Gazette and the Sherbrooke Daily Record came out in support of the Tories, after having endorsed the Pearson Liberals in 1965. The French-language L’Action and Le Devoir also endorsed Stanfield. “Because of his choice of Mr. Faribault, Mr. Stanfield has faced for some time a campaign of perfidious insinuation in English Canada,” wrote Claude Ryan in Le Devoir. “The very fact that, knowing what he was doing, he still accepted such a risk, shows his good faith and the seriousness of his intentions.”60 Seen from the vantage point of English Canada, Ryan’s endorsement of Stanfield revealed the depth of the national-unity crisis that Trudeau had gone to Ottawa to solve. A leading federalist tastemaker in Quebec (and a future leader of the Quebec Liberal Party) had endorsed a unilingual Tory from Atlantic Canada over a brilliant, bilingual Quebecer. How could the nation invoked endlessly by Quebec nationalists not include Pierre Trudeau?

  René Lévesque, now the leading spokesperson for that nation, urged members of his new Mouvement souveraineté-association not to vote for either of the major parties but rather to pick the candidates who would best represent their local communities. At a June 22 MSA rally, Lévesque dismissed Trudeau as un roi nègre (a negro king), just as Trudeau had predicted he would. The prime minister was the instrument of “the federal gang,” said Lévesque, trying to persuade Canadians that bilingualism could patch up the country’s constitutional impasse.61 The outcome of the federal election did not matter much either way, Lévesque mused, since Quebec would soon be independent.

  With much of English Canada in the grip of Trudeaumania, Pierre Bourgault and his separatist comrades escalated their threats against the hated vendu prime minister. “Trudeau has heard the voice of Toronto last Wednesday,” an unidentified RIN spokesperson told the press. “Now he is going to hear the voice of Quebec. It will not be the same song. No one, including Trudeau, can put the French Canadians back in their place.”62

  On June 21, Trudeau travelled in an open-air bus from Toronto to Montreal, making several short campaign stops en route. In Kingston, NHL star Bobby Hull presented him with a hockey stick. (“You can use it to beat off all the good-looking broads,” said Hull.) At a mall in suburban Pointe-Claire, seven thousand Quebecers turned out to see the prime minister, where, among other diversions, he danced in a parking lot with a young woman while his bus was refuelled. Far more dramatic was Trudeau’s visit to Gérard Pelletier’s Hochelaga riding in Montreal, where he was greeted by a well-organized crowd of RIN protesters chanting “Québec aux Québécois!” and “Trudeau, pouilleux!” (Trudeau, lousy!). Trudeau shot back with “Canada aux Canadiens!” and then spoke to the rest of the crowd. “These are the kind of people who would cause violence to prevent me from attending the St. Jean Baptiste parade,” he said. Calling the protesters “small people with small ideas,” Trudeau added, “You can imagine what kind of a republic you would have with these people. With these guys, we’d have a police state.”63

  Trudeau capped off his Quebec campaign on June 21 with a noon-hour rally at Montreal’s Place Ville Marie. There, a crowd of 35,000 supporters listened attentively to his speech and even sang “O Canada” along with him. Oddly, there were virtually no hecklers present, so the prime minister could describe his vision of Canada without interruption. “Of course one country, one ethnic group, one language, one nation—of course it would be simpler,” he told Montrealers. “When we talk of one nation, we are not talking about this kind of nation. We are talking of the Canadian people, the Canadian country, the soil that belongs to all Canadians no matter where they come from. We are in a province and a city with a French majority. We want the English-speaking minority and
all the others to be welcome in our province in the same way we want French Canadians to be at home everywhere in the country.”64

  Squeezing everything he could out of the short time remaining in the campaign, Trudeau gave speeches in Winnipeg, Sault Ste. Marie, and Ottawa on June 23. The next day, he appeared in Renfrew, Ontario, and Maniwaki, Quebec, before finally circling back to his hometown.

  And there, in Montreal, in defiance of René Lévesque’s insults, Pierre Bourgault’s threats of violence, and his own advisers’ cautionary advice, he attended la fête nationale on rue Sherbrooke, like any other proud Quebecer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE CALM AFTER THE STORM

  “It was the most remarkable ending to an election campaign in Canadian political history,” the venerable Canadian Annual Review would later say of the June 24 Saint-Jean-Baptiste riot. “The price was a savage one, but nothing would have better dramatized the issue of Canadian unity.”1

  For the vast majority of Canadians and Quebecers—including the separatists uniting under the banner of René Lévesque’s MSA—there simply was no place in their democratic inheritance for political violence. They were saddened but not surprised to discover that some impatient young firebrands, in their rage for liberation, had persuaded themselves and their even younger followers that rioting in the streets would jump-start their imagined utopia of peace and harmony. “Scenes of St. Jean Baptiste Day violence in Montreal might have shocked Canadians more had they not been conditioned by films of terrorism in the streets of New York, Paris and Belgrade,” lamented the Globe and Mail on Canadians’ behalf. “It was chilling to hear the chants of ‘Trudeau to the gallows.’ And it was awful to know that there were, in that crowd, men who had threatened the Prime Minister’s life.”2

  Pierre Trudeau emerged from the spectacle physically unscathed and politically untouchable. In any other context, Trudeau’s courage would have been notable. But in the tumultuous spring of 1968, it was extraordinary. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy lay dead. In late May, President Charles de Gaulle had fled the Élysée Palace in the face of violent street protests. Yet there sat the Canadian prime minister in an open reviewing stand, face-to-face with a violent demonstration mounted specifically to challenge his authority. Everyone, including Trudeau, knew beforehand that there would be violence. The only question was how much. One answer came the next day when, coincidentally, Quebec prison escapee Gaston Plante was sentenced for illegally possessing a .38-calibre revolver, among other crimes. Plante was asked in the courtroom what he intended to do with the firearm. “I was not keeping the gun for criminal purposes,” he replied. “It was for political aims. It was to be used by a terrorist to slay that traitor, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”3 The plan was to murder the prime minister at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste parade, Plante added.

  When the headlines declared “Trudeau tient tête aux manifestants” (“Trudeau stands up to protesters”) the day after the Saint-Jean-Baptiste riot, Canadians knew that the man who had made his way to Ottawa in 1965 to combat Quebec separatism was no paper tiger.

  In one sense at least, election day was anticlimactic. The last of the pre-election polls showed Trudeau and the Liberals still riding high, only marginally off their pre-campaign peak of 52 per cent. A Gallup survey published on June 22 showed the Liberals leading with 47 per cent of decided voters, followed by the Tories at 29 per cent, and the NDP at 18 per cent. Political scientist Peter Regenstreif, the Toronto Star’s campaign number-cruncher, cautioned that behind the results lay considerable volatility, estimating that the Liberals could win as many as 145 seats or as few as 128.4 A poll of Globe and Mail correspondents envisaged a Liberal landslide at 152 seats.5

  Pierre Trudeau spent most of election day in Montreal. He visited his mother in Outremont in the morning, where his neighbours greeted him with a friendly “Bonjour, petit Pierre!” He then cast his own vote in the riding of Mount Royal. (Informed of a bomb threat at one of several Mount Royal polling stations he visited that morning, he replied, “Oh well, Russian roulette.”)6 In the afternoon, the prime minister was driven out to Dorval airport. He made a special point of chatting with the police officers in his motorcycle escort who had friends injured in the riot.7 Once his chartered DC-9 had dropped him in Ottawa for the last time, Trudeau was driven directly to Liberal Party headquarters, where he settled in to watch the evening election broadcast. At about 9 p.m. he asked to be driven to the Château Laurier hotel. There, he made his way through hallways and elevators packed with expectant party members, fans, and media to a fifth-floor suite where he watched the rest of the election returns with Lester and Maryon Pearson. On this auspicious night at least, Trudeau and the Liberals had the capital to themselves. Robert Stanfield had finished out the campaign in his home riding of Halifax. Tommy Douglas remained in Vancouver.

  The election results trickled in, as they always do, in a staggered east-to-west sequence as polling stations in each of Canada’s six time zones closed.

  The results from Atlantic Canada were uniformly bad for the Liberals. Robert Stanfield’s Tories took six of Newfoundland’s seven seats—a province where all of the incumbents had been Liberals. (“Mr. Trudeau was a friend of Newfoundland,” Joey Smallwood admonished voters in his province. “We’ve slapped him in the face today.”)8 Not surprisingly, given Stanfield’s pre-eminent status in Nova Scotia, the Tories took ten of that province’s eleven seats, including Stanfield’s own Halifax riding. Allan MacEachen was the only Liberal elected in the province, a victory that boosted his political career by making him indispensable to any Trudeau cabinet. Prince Edward Island returned four out of four Tories, as it had in 1965. In New Brunswick, the Tories and the Liberals split the ten seats evenly, a one-seat gain for the Conservatives over their 1965 showing.9

  In Quebec, arguably the province with the biggest stake in the constitutional debate that had dominated the campaign, the Liberal sweep was breathtaking. The party won fifty-six of the province’s seventy-four seats—the same number as it had won in 1965—but with an eight-point increase in the popular vote (from 45.6 per cent to 53.6). Réal Caouette’s Créditistes took fourteen seats, five more than in 1965 but without increasing their share of the popular vote. The big story in Quebec was the rout of the Progressive Conservatives. Stanfield’s Tories took only four seats in Quebec, compared with eight in 1965. But their share of the popular vote dropped from 21.2 per cent to a paltry 5.4 per cent. Marcel Faribault lost his Montreal seat to the rookie Liberal Arthur Portelance—and lost badly, 19,051 votes to 8,866. “The people have expressed their choice,” a bitter Faribault conceded after the loss. “I think they will be sorry for having simplified the issues to the extremes. Mr. Trudeau has won after conducting a campaign in a way which I cannot approve and of which I would not be proud. His tactics were tantamount to blitzkrieg and I feel sorry that Canadian politics have reached such a stage. Now I’m asking myself, ‘what have we failed to do?’”10 Quebec NDP leader Robert Cliche also lost his Montreal seat (to Liberal Eric Kierans). Like his leader, Tommy Douglas, who lost his Burnaby–Seymour seat to Liberal Ray Perrault, Cliche blamed the loss entirely on Trudeaumania.

  If the scale of the Liberal victory in Quebec was surprising, the party’s sweep of Ontario was not. In that province, Liberals took sixty-three of eighty-eight seats, in effect shutting their rivals out of the cities. Prairie voters turned out to be far less enamoured of Trudeau and the Liberals than their central Canadian counterparts. In Manitoba, the Liberals took five of sixteen seats, leaving five for the Tories and three for the NDP. In Saskatchewan, the Liberals took only two of thirteen seats, the Tories five, and the NDP six. In Alberta, the Liberals took a meagre four seats out of nineteen, the Tories the remainder. In B.C., in contrast, the Liberals took sixteen of the province’s twenty-three seats and the NDP took the rest, shutting the Tories out altogether. A Liberal won the only seat in the Northwest Territories, and a Tory the only seat in the Yukon.

  Nationally, these r
esults amounted to a Liberal landslide larger than anyone had predicted. The party’s share of the popular vote came in at 45.5 per cent, compared to the Tories’ 31.4 per cent. The NDP came third with 17.0 per cent, the Créditistes fourth with 4.4 per cent. What counted, of course, was the seat distribution. Canadians had rewarded Trudeau with the first majority government in a decade. The Liberals ended up with 155 seats of 264 in the House of Commons—23 seats more than the Pearson Liberals had won in 1965. The Tories took 72 seats, the NDP 22, and the Créditistes 14. Just under eight million Canadians had cast ballots in the election. But in contrast with Pierre Trudeau’s high-flying rhetoric about citizen engagement, the voter participation rate came in at 75.7 per cent—lower than the rate in the 1962, 1963, and 1972 elections, and only a point higher than in the “wasteful and unnecessary” election of 1965.

  Once the national election results were known, Robert Stanfield gave a sombre concession speech to an almost empty room at Halifax’s Lord Nelson Hotel. Ever the gentleman, he congratulated Trudeau on winning the majority mandate he had sought and wished him success on the “serious responsibilities” that lay before him. “My duty, and that of my colleagues, is to provide an Opposition in Parliament that is informed, vigorous, effective and responsible,” said Stanfield. “And we will do that. But we also recognize a larger responsibility—outside Parliament as well as within—a responsibility to encourage the achievement of a genuine and effective unity in Canada—and to encourage the government to meet certain basic problems which, if they are not met, will have serious consequences for all of us.”11 Never one for dissembling, John Diefenbaker cut straight to the heart of the matter. “The Conservative party suffered a calamitous disaster,” he said, fuelling speculation that Stanfield might be forced to resign the party leadership.12 For its part, the NDP had increased its national seat count by one over its 1965 showing. Tommy Douglas was philosophical about losing his own seat, assuring his supporters that he would never stop fighting for social justice. “I’ll keep smiling,” he said.13