Just Watch Me

by John English

  Trudeau and, more particularly, Lalonde, Davey, and Pitfield had blamed the chaotic character of Pearson’s Cabinet on its lack of structure. Acting on their advice and his own growing fascination with systems analysis and futurology, Trudeau set out to impose order on the tradition-encrusted system of Cabinet government. In truth, the system badly needed change as modern communications, new technologies (especially photocopying), and the expansion of government services had overwhelmed the world that Mackenzie King’s mandarins had carefully constructed. In the mid-1960s the filing system that had developed in the 1940s collapsed under the weight of expanded government functions and mountains of paper. “When I came on the scene,” Trudeau wrote, “the volume of mail increased fourfold…. [It] meant I had to respond to such uncontrollable situations by multiplying my staff.” He added that most governments based on the British parliamentary system, including Conservative Margaret Thatcher’s, expanded dramatically to meet the new challenges. Indeed, Pitfield, Trudeau’s chief architect of government machinery, struck up a close friendship with Burke Trend, who bore the same responsibility in the United Kingdom.9 But Trudeau went further than the British and undertook a thorough restructuring of the Cabinet and caucus system. The controversial effects of those reforms shaped Canadian government for decades.

  First, he established “regional desks” within the Prime Minister’s Office, creating a countervailing force to the ministers themselves. The notion of opposing forces increasingly attracted Trudeau in the sixties and deeply influenced his approach to government organization and politics generally. Next he expanded the role of the government caucus and permitted it to debate legislation before it was presented to Parliament. Caucus members could confront ministers directly—and they frequently did. He began a process through which MPs obtained funds for constituency offices and acquired greater office resources and support for family travel. Although the initial impulse was his call for “participatory democracy,” the changes later responded to his need to keep MPs satisfied while power became more centralized. The centralization occurred through a system of eight Cabinet committees, the most significant being “Priorities and Planning,” which Trudeau chaired. It served as the Cabinet’s coordinator, and ministers were obliged to follow the priorities it set. In a significant break with the past, Cabinet committees could make decisions, and within committees, individual ministers debated the policies of their colleagues. At Cabinet itself, only controversial or major items came forward for discussion, and ministers had to defend them against their colleagues and the informed and sometimes intense questioning of Trudeau himself. Ministerial assistants could not attend Cabinet committee meetings, but public servants could. The result was a tough and demanding process that sought to impose consensus on ministers and clarity on decisions.

  Later appraisals of the changes have been largely unfavourable—reflecting the often caustic comments of Cabinet members of the time. “It reinforced the weak and frustrated the strong,” John Turner grumbled. Veterans Allan MacEachen and Paul Martin found the Cabinet meetings interminable and ineffective as tools of government—“the enemy of political common sense.” The experienced civil servant, prime ministerial adviser, and Newfoundland politician Jack Pickersgill, whom many regarded as the shrewdest political analyst of his generation, “deplored” Trudeau’s “lack of interest in good administration and his poor judgment of the suitability of men and women for membership in the Cabinet and high administrative posts”—an implicit criticism of Davey and Pitfield. The most extensive academic study of the attempt to bring a systems approach to Canadian government, by Dr. Jason Churchill, also concludes that expectations were not met and that achievements fell far short of what had been promised when the spirited band around Trudeau set out to remake Canadian government. Gordon Robertson, the experienced bureaucrat who became Trudeau’s first secretary to the Cabinet, admits that the system limited certain ministers: he recalls how John Turner once exploded in a conversation with him, saying it was impossible to handle the Finance ministry “with twenty-three God-damned ministers of Finance.” As for the systems analysis, Robertson “never discerned any advantage in any of it.” Even Trudeau later concluded, “We may have gone a bit overboard at times.”10

  Perhaps—but governments in those times badly needed reform. Trudeau’s attempts responded to the challenges of complexity that overwhelmed officials and politicians in democratic societies throughout the West. The political system, and participation in it, had lost their allure for Kennedy’s “new generation” of Americans. In partial response, they turned initially to protest and even violence, and then inward to drugs or social movements such as feminism and sexual liberation. Trudeau’s reforms of Cabinet and caucus, along with the many task forces, white papers, and discussion groups packaged as “participatory democracy,” attempted to reinvigorate public space and citizen involvement. The intent was to create a mass party in which caucus members played leadership roles. Postwar optimism about the managerial revolution, Keynesian budgeting, and the welfare state was quickly eroding, and critics of the liberal consensus were increasingly influential, not only on the left with Noam Chomsky and Theodor Adorno but also on the right with Edward Banfield and Milton Friedman. The sixties began with a celebration of the long prosperity that followed the creation of the activist state in the forties. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Harold Wilson’s “white heat” of technological revolution, and late in the decade, Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society all captured the confidence of liberal politicians committed to activist intervention for the general good.

  The dream began to die with Vietnam and race riots on the one hand and slowing productivity growth and unsuccessful, expensive social programs on the other. “After 1968,” American historian James Patterson writes, “there was no turning back to the higher hopes that liberals had had in 1964 and early 1965.”11 The backlash set in, and Americans lost faith in politicians and political action. Canada, characteristically, followed later, and the delay was fortunate for Trudeau. It meant that many able and brilliant young people followed him to Ottawa and formed a corps of remarkable public servants. One of them, Maureen O’Neil, later recalled the sense of excitement and experiment and the “tremendous energy” that drew her to public service in those years. Trudeau’s Ottawa was very distant from what American historian Rick Perlstein has called “Nixonland,” where public debate was rooted in anger and resentment and public service was demeaned by left and right.12 Detailed studies of the 1968 election reveal that support for Trudeau’s Liberals “varied directly with religiosity, moral liberalism, interest in foreign affairs, greater importance being attached to the central government,” and a “general optimism about the future and economic expectations.”13 In Canada it remained the Liberal hour, if only briefly.

  Trudeau’s insistence on “pragmatism,” his refusal to be “Santa Claus,” and his vague description of the “Just Society” betrayed his own growing doubts about some parts of the Liberal legacy. Already the Pearson government had delayed the introduction of medicare because of economic pressures. In January 1968, as new health care costs loomed, Mitchell Sharp, the finance minister, had warned that Ottawa’s resources were limited and that the provinces must consequently adopt policies of restraint. As estimates of the costs of medicare continued to rise, the quarrel between the provincial and federal governments over payment intensified. These differences mingled intimately with the ongoing discussions about constitutional reform. Soon after the election, the new finance minister, Edgar Benson, announced that the federal government would follow policies of restraint and that the expansion of government must come to an end. Trudeau warned his Cabinet that it was not enough to bring forward programs; their costs must always be understood as well. Montreal businessman and retired brigadier-general Charles “Bud” Drury, the secretary of the Treasury Board, gained early prominence in Trudeau’s government as the enforcer of fiscal discipline, and he quickly
became one of Trudeau’s most trusted advisers. Drury’s advice habitually erred on the side of caution, and Trudeau would find his arguments increasingly convincing.

  In Trudeau’s capacious mind, enthusiasm was always tempered by doubt, particularly as the social spending commitments of the sixties not only endured but grew. Beyond the closed Cabinet doors, however, the summer of 1968 remained a time for celebration—a political “honeymoon,” even for many of Trudeau’s campaign critics. In Le Devoir, Claude Ryan praised the new Cabinet, especially the strong Quebec representation, declaring that Trudeau had become “a calm leader, sure of himself, conscious of his power but resolved to employ it with moderation.” He was cautious, yet aware of the “great desire for renewal which was the source of his success.”14 Trudeau no doubt smiled wryly: he knew the honeymoon would be brief.

  With his popularity at its peak, Trudeau left on July 21 for a tour of Canada’s Arctic—a region that had always fascinated him and had never before been visited by a prime minister. Travelling almost fifteen thousand kilometres—first in a Jetstar and then in a DC-3, an Otter, and a helicopter—he traversed the vast northern lands in a mere eight days. He went with a party of ten, including his brother, Charles; R.J. Orange, the MP for the Northwest Territories; and New Yorker writer Edith Iglauer.* Trudeau camped out on Ellesmere Island, attended church in Fort Chimo, fished for Arctic char, and even danced with Inuit “go-go girls” at Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit). The journey strengthened the image of his intimacy with nature and the Canadian frontier. That image reflected the reality of his fascination with the wilds but also had romantic appeal in the apartments of Canada’s expanding cities. In an interview as the frantic trip ended, Trudeau claimed that the “Eskimos” were less “miserable” than they had been when he encountered them on canoe trips a decade earlier. Still, he concluded, the “North” was far from an economic “takeoff.”15

  As usual, Trudeau’s travels and antics dominated the front pages that summer as the ministers in Ottawa busily put together their programs for the autumn. The records of their deliberations reveal much unfinished business from the Pearson years—notably, the Official Languages bill, the amendment of the Criminal Code begun by Trudeau himself in 1967, and the reform of Parliament. To these items were added a series of reviews, the most significant of which were in the areas of defence and foreign policy and, separately, taxation policy.16 The tax review was needed to prepare a response to the massive Carter Commission report of 1967, which had recommended a radical restructuring of taxation in Canada. It immediately caused controversy in its emphasis on equity in the sense of fairness and the integration of all income, including capital gains, which Canada did not then tax. “A buck is a buck is a buck,” it famously declared, to the despair of Bay Street and some parts of Main Street. Benson began to work on a specific program based on the Carter recommendations, but the task, as we shall see, took several years, caused enormous controversy, and resulted in a political firestorm late in the mandate of Trudeau’s first government.17

  The summer’s end brought another foray into Canadian affairs on the part of French president Charles de Gaulle, who on September 9 compared Canada to Nigeria, which was in the middle of a bloody civil war. When asked whether the election of a francophone changed matters in Canada, he replied, “Definitely not.” De Gaulle and his officials knew and despised Trudeau—“l’adversaire de la chose française au Canada”—and the contempt was mutual. Trudeau acidly rebuked de Gaulle on September 11 and went on to attack the activities of Philippe Rossillon, a French official working in Canada under a France-Canada cultural accord, as those of a “secret agent.” His suspicions intensified when some French officials close to de Gaulle intrigued to support separatism and nationalism in Canada.18 The Rossillon affair, which centred on this official’s activities with Franco-Manitobans and Acadians, paralleled the struggle between Canada and France to exert economic and diplomatic influence within the Francophonie, an international francophone organization, and so advance the very separate national interests of Canada and France. The relationship between France and Quebec was, therefore, a central issue in Trudeau’s first two years as prime minister.

  Later, the shrewd political analyst Jim Coutts correctly pointed to the weakness of these early years. Trudeau, in rhetoric and belief, wanted to shatter the old system of political power brokers, and he dreamed of a new politics that was “participatory”—where citizens would come together with their leaders to choose reason over passion in the shaping of public policy. But Trudeau soon learned that citizens “do not want to participate in a national debate in which they have to find their own way.” Rather, captured by his charisma, they expected him to lead, not debate. Trudeau’s attempt to have public reviews and study groups examine “subjects from top to bottom” ended with “few initiatives” and considerable frustration. Most of these exercises “were counterproductive, squandering government resources and sapping the creative energies of both elected politicians and the public service.” Trudeau would have been wiser, Coutts said, to have concentrated on four or five “very specific ideas” at most. Instead, in its first years, the government established a study group that brought forward twelve priorities—far too many even for a new majority government. Ironically, Trudeau was most successful not in his new initiatives but in ensuring the continuance of the rich legacy of his predecessor.19

  That legacy meant that three central issues dominated Canadian politics in the fall of 1968: the Constitution and Quebec; the reform of social legislation to reflect the new Canada emerging in the 1960s; and Canada’s role in the world as the Vietnam War and the rise of Europe profoundly altered inter national relations. There was also the need to adjust fiscally to the new demands on the federal treasury caused by the expansion of government. In the case of the Constitution and Quebec, Trudeau took a direct hand. He chaired the Cabinet committee formed to deal with federal-provincial relations, and his closest assistants devoted most of their attention to the issue: Marchand skillfully managed the Quebec Liberals; Pelletier gracefully gained entry to hostile editorial boardrooms and university seminars; and Marc Lalonde used his lawyer’s sharp eye for detail and his Jesuit-trained mind for organization. Later, other members of Trudeau’s Cabinets complained that a separate “Quebec group” had captured the constitutional issue. Although others, notably Gordon Robertson in the early years, penetrated this group, the nature of the constitutional question meant that inevitably there was a tendency to discuss it within the confines of a small group of old and close friends. Their closeness was initially a source of strength for Trudeau and his government, but later it became a source of weakness.20

  Trudeau’s personal life was a perpetual source of public and press interest, and in the spring of 1969, many saw him as the “No. 1 catch.” Chatelaine, the leading magazine for women in Canada, ran numerous features on Trudeau, including one with the direct title “Whom Should Trudeau Marry?” The article was adorned with photographs of “some past and recent dates,” notably the winsome young Montreal actress Louise Marleau, who had played Juliet at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival in the summer. Local newspapers had wondered whether Ottawa’s Romeo would kiss his Juliet when he visited the festival. He did. Interestingly, Marleau’s sister, Huguette, was Trudeau’s Conservative opponent in Mount Royal in the 1968 election. Other dates mentioned in the article included Jennifer Rae and Carleton University professor Madeleine Gobeil. The article kept up the tease by submitting Trudeau’s characteristics to a computer and asking what type of woman would suit the prime minister. The answer was trivial, but more interesting was the comment that “Trudeau requires extensive and high compatibility in a woman because he has lived for half a century; he has a distinctive (bachelor) lifestyle; he is more rigid and conservative than liberal for a number of reasons: his mother’s rather than father’s influence in mid-teens; his need for control and self-discipline; his basic shyness; the need to tame his impulses and temper. He does not seek
completion with another, so that his tolerance for others and for nearness is low…. He is basically a loner.”21

  Neither Trudeau nor his friends would have disagreed with this perceptive computer. He was most certainly a loner, though he often appeared at theatres, in restaurants, on ski hills, and in the driveway of 24 Sussex Drive with many different but always beautiful women. The times, too, were changing—most dramatically in the traditional patterns of courtship throughout the West. Trudeau had dated widely and continually in the fifties, a decade when, as the novelist Ian MacEwan writes, “to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” Like many men, Trudeau welcomed the greater sexual openness that suddenly blossomed, but Carroll Guérin recalls that there were limits to his embrace of new ways: pangs of jealously affected him when he learned that she had begun to date others in England at the end of the sixties, even though he declared he was not a jealous type.22

  Immediately after the Liberal leadership convention, Trudeau got in touch with Jennifer Rae, and they began to date that very week. For several months they “went to movies, out to dinner, occasionally to cocktail parties, formal dinners, and public events like the Montreal Grand Prix.” He was “inventive, passionate, and generous-spirited as a lover” if not so generous with funds. Frequently, Jennifer or the chauffeur had to buy the movie tickets, and the only gift Pierre ever gave her was a pair of old tennis shoes, which had obviously belonged to another girlfriend. They spent many weekends at Harrington Lake—Trudeau’s romantic retreat throughout his prime-ministerial tenure.