Just Watch Me

by John English

  * Pearson himself felt the slight but characteristically did not express anger. Although Trudeau was driven toward the election by events, notably the strong Liberal standing in polls and the argument with Quebec about the province’s role in international affairs, Douglas Fisher, a former NDP politician turned journalist, was correct when he said that there was an “atmosphere of indifference for Mr. Pearson when he retired in April 1968; there was a notable keenness by his successor to separate his government distinctly from the bad Pearson years—scandals, leaks, messy staggering parliaments, and disorganized ventures.” Douglas Fisher, “The Quick, Unusual Hallowing of Lester Pearson,” Executive (July 1973), 8.

  * Trudeau relied on physicist Jim Davey, a close assistant who was a “futurist,” to interpret McLuhan to him, but sometimes even Davey admitted he had no idea what McLuhan meant. McLuhan’s letter of April 16 had an impact upon Trudeau: “The men of the press can work only with people who have fixed points of view and definite goals, policies and objectives. Such fixed positions and attitudes are, of course, irrelevant to the electronic age. Our world [underlined by Trudeau] substitutes mosaics for points of view and probes for targets. Knowing of your acquaintance with De Tocqueville, I can understand why you have such an easy understanding of the North American predicament in the new electronic age.” Trudeau asked Davey to call McLuhan to thank him for this letter, but they did not connect. The following month, when Davey wrote to McLuhan, he said that they had discussed the ideas set out in the letter and that Trudeau wanted to speak with him after the election. McLuhan to Trudeau, April 16, 1968; Davey to McLuhan, May 21, 1968, TP, MG 26 020, vol. 9, file 9–28, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

  * One of his most frequent and tallest “dates” of the sixties, Carroll Guérin, recalls how Trudeau insisted that she wear flat shoes when they went out. Trudeau’s television presence is preserved well by the CBC and Radio-Canada. Readers may consult them at http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-73-2192/politics_economy/trudeau/ in English and http://archives.radio-canada.ca/IDD-0-18-2076/ personnalites/trudeau/ in French. Trudeau’s different speaking style in French and in English is visible—he is more animated in French, more modulated in English.

  * Laurendeau had counselled Trudeau on his career in the early forties; had been his party leader when Trudeau joined the Bloc populaire during the war; had written a long, critical, yet warm review of Trudeau’s essay on Quebec on the eve of the Asbestos Strike; and had encouraged Trudeau to go to Ottawa in 1965. Yet Trudeau often irritated him. He refused to congratulate Trudeau on his election that year, not least because he discovered that Trudeau had openly criticized the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Nevertheless, he met Trudeau in Ottawa shortly after his election to the House in 1965 and “was struck by his good spirits, and his energy: it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him so up.” Marchand told him that Trudeau was “wonderfully successful” in Ottawa and would soon be the Liberals’ “big man in French Canada, eclipsing all the others.” Laurendeau was depressed by the radicalization of the nationalist and separatist movement in the later 1960s. He wrote in his diary that the future for him looked “thankless” and that those for whom he felt “the most natural and spontaneous affection, will be in the opposite camp”—namely, René Lévesque and the young. “There is only one thing that repels me more than being snubbed by the young, and that is to flatter them like demagogues.” Life, he wrote, “is not going to smile on me much any more.” Trudeau shared some of these feelings when he considered his own place in Quebec. See Patricia Smart, ed., The Diary of André Laurendeau (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1991), 154, 168.

  * Readers may see the event in detail in this clip from the CBC archives: http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-73-2192-13270/politics_economy/trudeau/clip7. Donald Peacock includes an excellent account of this incident in his Journey to Power: The Story of a Canadian Election (Toronto: Ryerson, 1968), 372–77. This account draws on both of these sources as well as newspaper stories of the time.

  † Trudeau’s angry attacks on separatist hecklers undoubtedly strengthened English-Canadian belief that Trudeau would be “tough” on Quebec’s “rowdies.” At a meeting in Rouyn, Trudeau lashed out at separatists who were harassing him: “The men who killed Kennedy are purveyors of hate like you—those who refuse to discuss! There won’t be free speech in your Québec libre, monsieur … It’s not me you’re insulting. It’s your fellow citizens … If you want to get rid of foreigners, of the English, of American capital, it’s easy. You only have to continue the violence. But you’re going to be left behind by the 20th century.” Ottawa Citizen, quoted in George Radwanski, Trudeau (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978), 109.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NEW WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

  The year 1968 was “the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world,” Mark Kurlansky writes in his history of the “year that rocked the world.” “That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth. It was the beginning of the end of the cold war and the dawn of a new geopolitical order. Within that order, the nature of politics and of leaders changed. The Trudeau approach to leadership, where a figure is known by style rather than substance, has become entrenched.” Although American historians rarely cast their glance northward, Trudeau intrigued Kurlansky, who notes that “in a time of extremism, [Trudeau] was a moderate with a lefty style, but his exact positions were almost impossible to establish.” Yet in the spring of 1968, while Americans contemplated the choice of Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey, Canada became “a weirdly happy place.” Trudeau appealed, as Robert Fulford wrote forty years later, “to citizens who lived through a time of fractious partisanship and … [yearned] for a new era, with fresh energy and fresh optimism.” In those times, style truly matters.1

  In interpreting the Trudeau phenomenon, Kurlansky turns to Marshall McLuhan’s prediction that politicians will abdicate in favour of image because the image will be more powerful than the politician could ever be. Trudeau’s success in 1968 reflected and responded to broader forces within Canadian and North American politics and society. The choice of Trudeau as Liberal leader and then as prime minister arose from the transformation of politics caused by television. In the mid-sixties, news blended with entertainment to take the main stage in programs such as This Hour Has Seven Days, which taunted and mocked political leaders in songs by Dinah Christie and interviews by hosts Patrick Watson and Laurier LaPierre. When the CBC cancelled the program in May 1966, the public outcry led Prime Minister Pearson to appoint an inquiry.* It concluded that the producers had pushed the boundaries of journalistic traditions, ethics, and good taste, but in the late sixties, those boundaries were no longer fixed.2 Colour tele vision came quickly to Canada just as Seven Days ended, and the 1968 campaign, like the dramatic youth explosions in Paris, Prague, and New York, gained vibrancy and immediacy not only because of their varied hues but also because of hand-held cameras and other technical advances.

  Television was merciless for the bald and awkward Robert Stanfield. Trudeau cruelly mocked him as he told the press before a deliberately clumsy dive that he was doing a Stanfield imitation. Media historian Paul Rutherford concludes that Trudeau could not have “shot to stardom without television carrying his charisma into the homes of Canadians.” His rapid ascent to power was the first indication of its “fast-forward effect” on politics. Although Trudeau’s appearance and skills fitted TV especially well, the new importance of the medium meant that all political campaigns changed dramatically, as did the talents required of those who served political leaders.3 Their entourage swelled, eventually including makeup artists, voice trainers, and professional directors. Although earlier politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler had used mass communications, these tools became essential for success in the 1960s when presidents had to be “sold,” to use Joe McGinniss’s famous term. Cana
da, George Radwanski shrewdly noted, “was peculiarly hungry for a leader like Trudeau.” Its mood “was conditioned by nearly a decade of jealousy … [of] the presidency of John Kennedy,” and it now sought a leader like him: one who mastered television, surrounded himself with beautiful and intelligent women, communicated crisply, and conveyed excitement and energy.4 In short, Canadians wanted a leader unlike Lester Pearson, Mackenzie King, and Bob Stanfield.

  These were new times, and Trudeau’s team fitted right into them. Gordon Gibson, who had played a major part in the leadership campaign, recalled the extraordinary energy around Trudeau that attracted brilliant and exciting people to him. His campaign team and his staff were relatively new acquaintances, collaborators who shared his distrust of Quebec’s new nationalism—which he believed had replaced blind loyalty to the Church with an even more dangerous faith in the state. While rejecting separatism and nationalism, Trudeau embraced contemporary social science, with its postwar confidence in planning, rationality, and the rule of law. Born on the streets of Paris and in the lecture halls of the London School of Economics in the forties, Trudeau’s “socialism” now possessed the qualities of the liberal salons of New York, where Harvard economist and Democratic Party activist John Kenneth Galbraith’s still gentle critiques of American capitalism held sway and Le Monde’s editorial writer (and Trudeau acquaintance) Claude Julien praised both North American technology and the welfare state.

  In the new environment of the sixties, Trudeau’s “functional politics,” a term he had defined in the fifties as a rejection of ideological approaches, changed to fit with the secularism and nationalism that flowed vigorously into politics, economics, and the arts. Trudeau benefited politically from this surge of Canadian nationalism even as he was wary of its nature: “Nationalism will eventually have to be rejected as a principle of sound government,” he wrote. “In the world of tomorrow, the expression ‘banana republic’ will not refer to independent fruit-growing nations but to countries where formal independence has been given priority over the cybernetic revolution. In such a world, the state—if it is not to be outdistanced by its rivals—will need political instruments which are sharper, stronger, and more finely controlled than anything based on mere emotionalism: such tools will be made up of advanced technology and scientific investigation, as applied to the fields of law, economics, social psychology, international affairs, and other areas of human relations; in short, if not a pure product of reason, the political tools of the future will be designed and appraised by more rational standards than anything we are currently using in Canada today.” Canada was on a “collision course,” he warned, and only “cold, unemotional rationality” held promise if the country was to avert disaster.5

  In the same month that Trudeau wrote these comments, May 1964, he joined several other Quebec intellectuals in publishing “Pour une politique fonctionnelle” in Cité libre. Michael Pitfield, an Ottawa-based civil servant, translated the essay as “An Appeal for Realism in Politics” for The Canadian Forum, which left-leaning English Canadian intellectuals avidly read.6 Trudeau and his co-authors, attracted to the possibilities of contemporary social science, were repelled by the bluster of Diefenbaker, the emotionalism of René Lévesque, and the inadequacy of the anglophone Ottawa mandarins to deal with the crisis of Quebec.

  One of this manifesto’s authors, Marc Lalonde, Pearson’s chief policy adviser since 1965, was central to Trudeau’s rise to power. He was, Peter C. Newman wrote, “the first of a new breed of brilliant French-Canadian technocrats to move into a position of high influence within the Ottawa hierarchy.” Lalonde increasingly shared with Trudeau his concerns about the disorganization of Pearson’s office, the chaos of his Cabinet, and the lack of strategic planning in Ottawa. Pitfield, who worked in the Privy Council Office in the mid-1960s, echoed these concerns about the crisis of Canadian confederation and Pearson’s ability to cope with it. Like Trudeau, both these men, born and educated in Montreal, were bilingual, with disciplined work habits and Cartesian minds.7 They were also Liberal outsiders with Conservative roots.

  Ramsay Cook, the editor of The Canadian Forum at the time the article was published, was an active New Democrat. In 1968, however, he, too, left his traditional political affiliation and supported Trudeau’s political quest. Along with many other academics, he stepped down from the ivory tower, joined a constituency association, encouraged his students to become politically active, and published articles brimming with enthusiasm for Pierre Trudeau. Cook became a speechwriter for the Trudeau campaign, as did the elegant and perceptive writer Jean Le Moyne. They were joined by Roger Rolland, who had shared in some of Trudeau’s most outrageous pranks in the forties, fought with him against Duplessis in the fifties, and promoted him at Radio-Canada (where he worked) in the sixties. Two other young academics who signed the manifesto were also important in shaping Trudeau’s politics. They were the Breton brothers: Albert, an economist, and Raymond, a sociologist. Trudeau had met them in the early 1960s at the Université de Montréal, where they joined the Groupe de recherche sociale, founded by Fernand Cadieux, yet another prominent intellectual who took an active part in Trudeau’s campaign.

  It is significant that so many of those who now clustered around Trudeau had little previous political involvement—the newcomers, in fact, wore their inexperience and lack of Liberal background as a badge. Among the young academics and professionals who animated Trudeau’s quest for the leadership and the first days of government, only Gordon Gibson had strong Liberal ties, though they were excused because they were inherited: his father, Gordon Sr. had been a Liberal member of the British Columbia legislature in the 1950s. Otherwise, Trudeau’s supporters took pride in their recent conversions, and like most converts, they became passionate about the one cause they shared: Pierre.

  While the Bretons and Cook remained in academic life after June 1968, Lalonde, Pitfield, Gibson, and Cadieux became a central part of Trudeau’s personal staff when he took office. Other influential members included the British-born Montreal physicist Jim Davey, who shared Pitfield’s fascination with planning and “scientific” approaches to policy making, and Tim Porteous, who had met Trudeau in Africa in 1957 but was best known for his role in McGill University’s My Fur Lady, a satirical revue that went on to become a national hit. Prominent Montreal lawyer and academic Carl Goldenberg became a constitutional adviser, as did Ivan Head, a former External Affairs officer, who in 1963 had joined the law faculty of the University of Alberta. He took academic leave in 1967 to work for Trudeau and never returned.

  Just as My Fur Lady mocked Canadian customs, Trudeau’s staff and his new Cabinet shredded political traditions. They lacked party ties, were mostly from Quebec, and had little Ottawa experience. Lalonde and Pitfield had fretted about the absence of expertise on Quebec in Pearson’s office and the difficulty of recruiting francophones to Ottawa, but things soon changed. Trudeau’s office was much larger, bilingual, and thoroughly engrossed in Quebec politics. It reflected hope for the future, with little reference to Ottawa’s past.

  The Cabinet largely remained the one Trudeau had appointed after the convention, although some changes were necessary because of election losses (Maurice Sauvé) and others because of regional needs (the western provinces) and Trudeau’s personal interests. Unlike the Office of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet had considerable political experience, yet it, too, was remarkably youthful, with twenty-two of its twenty-nine members under fifty. Several ministers were in their thirties, including two future prime ministers: Jean Chrétien (thirty-four) at Indian Affairs and Northern Development and John Turner (thirty-nine) at Justice, with crucial responsibility for continuing the reform of the Criminal Code begun by Trudeau. Trudeau appointed his newly elected former leadership opponent Eric Kierans as postmaster general—traditionally a minor patronage position but one that suddenly became critical because Canadian postal workers (along with almost all federal civil servants) had gained the right to strike and were about
to take full advantage of it.

  Trudeau also promoted Jean Marchand to Forestry and Rural Development—which was soon transformed into the key ministry of Regional Development—and he named the other “wise man,” Gérard Pelletier, as secretary of state, responsible for the full range of government cultural policies. His old classmate Jean-Luc Pepin went to Industry, Trade, and Commerce—the most senior economic post ever held to that point by a francophone. The composition of this Cabinet allowed Trudeau to boast that he had brought French power to Canada—and he remained immensely proud of this achievement, even though it later became a political burden.

  At the Cabinet’s first meeting on July 8, Trudeau described how it would operate. There would be structure, records, efficiency, confidentiality, and responsibility. After welcoming the new ministers in his curiously flat but strong voice, Trudeau was blunt about his demands. First, he said, “was the matter of Cabinet solidarity. The oaths of Cabinet Ministers were to be taken very seriously. Policies would be hammered out in the Cabinet, and outside the Cabinet there must be complete solidarity. This was a very strict rule; if a Minister did not agree with a decision taken he had a right, and indeed a duty, to resign.” The first sign of any erosion of Cabinet solidarity would cause concern: “Ministers’ appointments were not forever, and it was possible to envisage movement out of the Cabinet as well as into it.” Trudeau was clear: the ministers served at his discretion. Recalling the damaging “leaks” of the Pearson years, he set down the rule for the new Cabinet members: “If the source of any leak of Cabinet information would be identified, the action taken would have to be merciless.” At the end of the meeting, he circulated a “work program” for the summer, which included an intensive series of meetings until July 20. After that, the ministers could take “three weeks’ holidays” before work resumed in mid-August.8 Trudeau, the dilettante, now seemed a distant memory. The Liberals had a leader, a majority government, and a mandate.