Just Watch Me

by John English

  At first Trudeau hesitated to call an election. After the convention he suddenly disappeared, and a frantic press finally discovered him in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his colleagues Edgar Benson and Jean Marchand and their wives. Benson, a pipe-smoking accountant and early supporter of Trudeau’s leadership bid, had co-chaired the Trudeau campaign, although few expected him to have a senior position in the new Cabinet. Marchand also smoked a pipe, but his ebullient nature and fiery oratory, crafted before tough, working-class audiences, contrasted strongly with the phlegmatic Benson’s style. Trudeau was comfortable with both, a trait that served him well in politics and in life more generally. By the time he returned to Ottawa and met the Pearson Cabinet on April 17, he was still ambiguous about the election date. He spoke about an “alternative course” in which the House would meet quickly and then dissolve. Two days later the Cabinet’s mood was one of “wide disenchantment” with “the present Parliament’s effectiveness, and general agreement in the country that the present Parliament was no longer useful or meaningful.” Faced with this turnaround, Pearson, who had settled at Harrington Lake with his fishing gear, was obliging when he was asked to resign, and Trudeau swore in his Cabinet on April 20, two days earlier than he had first indicated.9

  Trudeau had a rich legacy on which to draw: Pearson’s Cabinet was one of the most talented in Canadian history, with three future prime ministers in its ranks and several others who would make significant contributions to Canadian public life. Trudeau was cautious in his picks and, as he promised, pragmatic. Prime ministers normally ask their leadership opponents to join the Cabinet, and Trudeau complied. The brilliant and often difficult Eric Kierans was the sole exception—but only because he was not an MP. Joe Greene, whose folksy speech at the convention charmed the delegates and received high marks from the media, became minister of agriculture. John Turner had irritated Trudeau by his decision to remain on the last ballot, but his political talents could not be ignored and he was rewarded with the ministry of consumer and corporate affairs. Paul Hellyer, who had created huge controversy when he unified Canada’s armed forces, became minister of transport. The wily and experienced Cape Bretoner Allan MacEachen, who was deeply committed to social Catholicism, became minister of national health and welfare.

  The political veteran Paul Martin, who only a year previously had been considered the most likely successor to Pearson, now presented a problem. Trudeau thought poorly of Martin’s leadership in the Department of External Affairs, and he blamed some of Martin’s people for rumours about his socialism and his personal life. Still, Martin had a following and impressive political experience. The two men met and talked about the justice portfolio, but the devout Catholic Martin did not want to implement the reforms already planned for the Criminal Code, with their liberal approach to homosexuality and abortion. A bit grumpily, the good soldier Martin therefore accepted the position of government leader in the Senate. However, Trudeau’s major opponent, Bay Street favourite Robert Winters, decided to step aside after two meetings with Trudeau. “Pierre,” Winters said on April 17, “we have been talking for two hours on two successive days, and I still don’t know if you want me in your government or if you don’t.” Trudeau replied, “Well, it’s a decision you will have to make.” In these laconic words, Trudeau revealed a persistent trait: he insisted that individuals make their own decision. Ardent wooing was not his game.10

  He had no desire to woo former Pearson minister Judy LaMarsh, who at the convention, with microphone nearby, told Hellyer to fight the “bastard” Trudeau to the end. She resigned abruptly as expected and muttered something about becoming an independent. Trudeau’s first Cabinet had no female member, an appalling weakness given that Diefenbaker and Pearson both had female ministers. The influence of francophones and of Quebec was, however, striking. The Cabinet announced on April 20 had eleven ministers from Quebec and eleven francophones. This strong representation appears to have resulted in the assignment of the major offices, External Affairs and Finance, to the Ontarians Mitchell Sharp and Edgar Benson, respectively. The weakness of the Liberal Party in the West limited Trudeau’s choices, with British Columbia’s Arthur Laing being the only significant western Canadian minister. Charles “Bud” Drury, a superb administrator whose Montreal patrician style appealed to Trudeau, became industry minister, and the effervescent Jean-Luc Pepin, whom Trudeau had known since their university days in Paris in the forties, became minister of labour.

  It was, as Trudeau said at the time, a “makeshift” Cabinet designed to emphasize continuity. He also told the press that he chose this particular Cabinet composition to allay any fears that his government “appeared to be that of a new bunch of outsiders coming into the party.” Caution and continuity prevailed because an election loomed. Everyone knew the Cabinet that mattered would be formed after the election—a Cabinet that would fully reflect Trudeau’s political agenda.11

  Although the Cabinet was traditional, the mood and style in Ottawa were suddenly very different. Reporters were startled and photographers delighted when, on April 22, they spied Trudeau sprinting across Parliament Hill to his office to avoid a group of “girls” from Toronto who were pursuing him. The Globe and Mail featured three photographs of the chase on its front page, following a comment that Trudeau “is clearly savoring his new power and its fringe benefits—old ladies queuing up for his autograph, young girls clamoring to be kissed, mothers holding up their babies to see the great man pass, and traffic jams on the street as motorists stop to catch a glimpse.” Cabinet colleagues soon learned, however, that Trudeau’s public playfulness and frivolity were left behind at the door. At his first formal meeting, he sternly warned his new ministers that he would not tolerate any “leaks” about his political plans. A leak had apparently occurred the previous weekend, with stories about the “hawks” and the “chickens” in the Cabinet—the former favouring an election, the latter opposing it. He also served notice that he would “ensure improved discipline in the attendance of Ministers in the House of Commons and in the coordination of House business.” He established the rudiments of a Cabinet committee system that would become a fundamental alteration in the method of government. From that first meeting, it was apparent that Trudeau meant business. To his political colleagues, he was no longer “Pierre;” he was now “Prime Minister.”12

  The next morning, April 23, he met the caucus on Parliament Hill after a meeting with Senators Dick Stanbury and John Nichol, the present and past Liberal Party presidents, to discuss the latest very good poll results. The caucus was raucous, and most Liberal MPs were ready for an election. So was Trudeau. He went immediately to his West Block office and slipped away via a secret staircase. Then, to avoid suspicion, he entered a car in which a puzzled Paul Martin was waiting. They travelled inconspicuously past the Parliament Buildings and along Rideau Street and soon arrived at Martin’s residence at Champlain Towers, in Ottawa’s east end. They descended to the basement garage, where yet another car awaited Trudeau. With the press completely tricked, his new driver took him to Rideau Hall, which he entered by the inconspicuous greenhouse entrance; there a bemused Governor General Roland Michener signed the order dissolving the House. As Martin later wrote, the “twist perfectly illustrated Trudeau’s liking for the unexpected and his disdain for convention.”13

  Trudeau then returned to the House of Commons and announced that there would be an election on June 25. The twenty-seventh Parliament ended five minutes after it began, with order papers thrown wildly into the air amid yelps of joy and final embraces before the campaign. Stanfield was furious, and he said at his press conference that Trudeau’s request for a mandate was absurd, given that there was “no record, no policy, and no proof of his ability to govern the country.” But it was not only the opposition parties that were upset. The unexpected dissolution of Parliament left no time for tributes to Lester Pearson—and the revered former prime minister was denied the opportunity to make the gracious speech he had prepa
red in response to the expected generous praise of his friends, colleagues, and successor. To make matters worse, April 23 was his seventy-first birthday. Maryon Pearson’s affection for Trudeau diminished—though not greatly. The slight was not deliberate, but it reflected a carelessness in personal interactions and manners that sometimes marked Trudeau’s behaviour.14

  Few commented on the oversight, however, and Canadians already seemed too eager to shed memories of Pearson and his stumbling government.* With excitement rising, the party that had so coyly embraced Trudeau now rushed to follow his colours. Trudeau recalled his Conservative father complaining bitterly in the thirties about the Liberal “campaign machine,” but now the gears of that machine began to grind steadily in his support. Financial support, a considerable worry for the party, suddenly appeared as individual donations complemented substantial funds from the corporate world. Throughout the country MPs, senators, candidates, fundraisers, and others rallied behind their irreverent, unpredictable, puzzling, but wildly popular new leader. They knew, after six years of minority governments, that they finally had a winner. Suzette Trudeau Rouleau, who possessed a sister’s skepticism, returned from one rally in shock and declared to a friend: “My goodness, Pierre is like a Beatle.” There was even a popular song, “PM Pierre,” with such lines as “PM Pierre with the ladies, racin’ a Mercedes / Pierre, in the money, find him with a bunny.”

  Aware of the photographer’s moment and the quick quip—the “sound bite” that slips neatly into TV news spots—Trudeau, like the Beatles, lived part of his life as a performance. The Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, then at the height of his international celebrity, was caught up in the campaign. He immediately declared that Trudeau perfectly fitted the sixties with its instant news, colour TV, and politics integrating quickly into the new technologies. “The story of Pierre Trudeau,” he wrote, “is the story of the Man in the Mask. That is why he came into his own with TV. His image has been shaped by the Canadian cultural gap. Canada has never had an identity. Instead it has had a cultural interface of 17th-century France and 19th-century America. After World War II, French Canada leapt into the 20th century without ever having had a 19th century. Like all backward and tribal societies, it is very much ‘turned on’ or at home in the new electric world of the 20th century.” Such comments appalled many of McLuhan’s academic colleagues, but Trudeau himself was intrigued. He shared McLuhan’s intuition that the new media had transformed not only politics but also what a politician represented to the electorate.* A correspondence between Trudeau and McLuhan, rich in irony and playfulness, began during the election campaign. When the CBC organized a leaders’ debate—the first in Canadian history—McLuhan rightly criticized the format in a letter to Trudeau. “The witness box cum lectern cum pulpit spaces for the candidates was totally non-TV.” “Total TV,” however, was perfect for Trudeau’s cool, detached, but vital image. “The age of tactility via television and radio is one of the innumerable interfaces or ‘gaps’ that replace the old connections, legal, literate, and visual,” he told Trudeau.15

  In terms of the media, the 1968 election represents a historic divide. Seventeen million Canadians watched the Liberal convention, and almost as many watched the leaders’ debate. Polling became constant, and American-style tours based on flights that jumped across the country became the norm. Trudeau flew in a DC-9 jet and followed a tight script: a brief statement, passage through the city centre in a convertible, followed by a shopping centre or hockey rink rally with cheerleaders clad in orange and white miniskirts. Cameras, of course, recorded Trudeau’s progress. Journalist Walter Stewart, Tommy Douglas’s sympathetic biographer, wrote that “beside Trudeau, Stanfield seemed lumpish and Tommy petulant. Stanfield flew in a propeller-driven DC-7 at half Trudeau’s speed and made laconic, dull, and sensible speeches. Tommy Douglas flew economy on Air Canada and made provocative speeches that, in most cases, he might as well have shouted into the closet back in his Burnaby apartment.”16 The opposition leaders struggled to find an issue that would focus the campaign, but they were not successful.

  Trudeau seemed bemused at the attention he received and remained so when he wrote his memoirs twenty-five years later. He recalled the “exceptional enthusiasm” of the crowds and the astonishing number of people who came to see. In Victoria, “a city of peaceful, respectable folk, many of them retired,” he had to be lowered from a helicopter onto a hill, where he was surrounded by thousands. He decided that the crowds came not to hear his speeches but to see the “neo-politician who had made such a splash.” It was “part of the spirit of the times,” part of the post-Expo mood of “festivity.”17

  There was certainly spontaneous excitement during the campaign, but there was also careful staging as the Liberal strategists focused on their leader in a way that only the new media made possible. For the TV cameras, they even staged a fake fall down the stairs by the athletic Trudeau. They had used “consultants” in 1963 to try to remake Pearson’s dowdy presence, but they were much more sophisticated five years later as they copied recent innovations in American politics. Richard Nixon loathed television, but he had learned from his ill-fated 1960 debate with John F. Kennedy, when he won among radio listeners but lost badly among those who watched his dark shadows on the screen, that politics had become principally the manipulation of images.18 Television embraced Trudeau: the dramatic high cheekbones; the intense blue eyes; the quick change of moods from caustic to shy to affectionate; the striking retort; and the “cool” presence. Somehow the camera missed his pock-marked cheeks, the faintly yellow tinge to his complexion, and his less than average height.* A grudging Walter Stewart complained that “whatever quality it is that [makes] TV work for one person and not for another, Trudeau had it.”19

  A superb actor, Trudeau knew well what the crowd wanted: the expert jackknife into a pool, beautiful and brilliant young people, and stunning women in miniskirts surrounding him. In his memoirs, he tellingly chose a photograph of a buxom young woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “Vote P.E.T. or Bust.” George Bain, the Globe and Mail’s senior columnist, wrote caustically of the Trudeau campaign: “If it puckers, he’s there.” And, seemingly, he always was.

  Trudeau enjoyed the attention, but he strongly resisted its tendency to trivialize his political message. Perhaps in response to Bain’s effective jibe, Trudeau gave him a long interview in which he tried to elaborate on the Liberals’ platform and, in particular, his call for a “Just Society.” At the time, May 22, the English press was becoming critical of the emphasis on style over substance in the Trudeau campaign. When Bain demanded, “What is a just society?” Trudeau replied:

  It means certain things in a legal sense—freeing an individual so he will be rid of his shackles and permitted to fulfil 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.

  Another aspect of it is economic, and, rather than develop that in terms of social legislation and welfare benefits, which I do not reject or condemn, I feel that at this time it is more important to develop in terms of groups of people … The Just Society means not giving them a bit more money or a bit more welfare. The Just Society for them means permitting the province or the region as a whole to have a developing economy. In other words, not to try to help merely the individuals but to try to help the region itself to make all parts of Canada liveable in an acceptable sense …

  Another one, I think, is in terms of our relations with other countries…. Canada [is] … a country of modest proportions in world terms—not geographically, but economically and in terms of its population—we must make sure that our contribution to world order is … not only … to appear just [but] … to be just.20

  The outlines of the “Just Society” remain faintly drawn in this interview, but the absence of sharp detail was intentional. Trudeau worried about expectations, and he took r
efuge in ambiguity and caution. He signalled that the great innovations in social welfare of the Pearson years—the Canada Pension Plan, medicare, and Canada Student Loans—would have no immediate successors. He would focus on “groups;” regions; and broad, incremental change. This comment took tangible form in the Trudeau years in new programs for regional economic development, special grants for youth and Aboriginals, recognition of the language rights of francophones throughout Canada, and the establishment of avenues through which francophones could more easily reach the pinnacle of the public service in Canada.

  Despite the apparent modesty of the proposed programs, Trudeau believed that he represented a revolutionary innovation in Canadian politics. He urged Canadians to “take a chance” on him, even though he was unwilling to tell them yet what their wager would mean. He played with their hopes, artfully revealing little while raising expectations. He had rehearsed for this moment since adolescence. On New Year’s Day 1938, he had written in his diary: “If you want to know my thoughts, read between the lines,” and six months later, he was forthright in expressing his ambitions: “I would like so much to be a great politician and to guide my nation.”21 He knew that ambiguity, paradox, irony, and a seductive elusiveness were assets in achieving the goal he had so long cherished: to be a great politician guiding a nation and affecting destiny. Pierre Trudeau had never been as happy as he was in the spring of 1968, and he revelled in the first sips of power.