by John English
Although minority government was demanding, Trudeau thrived on the sense of crisis, and Cabinet documentation reveals a confident, assertive leader willing to take risks he had earlier shunned. Trudeau had also established an unexpected personal friendship with British prime minister Edward Heath, based on his willingness to accept and even encourage Heath’s decision to lead Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC). Although he was not a monarchist in his heart, his personal encounters with the Queen in Canada in 1973 also created a warm relationship with Elizabeth II, whose insistence on speaking French with her Canadian prime minister charmed him—and her earlier reservations about his behaviour at his first Commonwealth Conference seem to have disappeared. He had been a most effective mediator at the Commonwealth Conference in Singapore, and Lee Kuan Yew of that nation became a friend with whom he enjoyed debating international and philosophical issues. And in contrast to the conservative Lee, the charismatic leftist Michael Manley of Jamaica appealed to Trudeau’s progressive past. Like Trudeau, the elegant and handsome Manley had attended the London School of Economics in the postwar years, worked for trade unions in the fifties, and refused to follow the formal dress codes that Jamaican public figures traditionally observed. They bonded right from their first meeting. The strength of their affection pervades Manley’s last tribute to Trudeau: “By training and instinct, he believes mankind’s best hopes lie in reason, persuasion, accommodation, seeing the other fellow’s point of view. To these qualities he adds the breadth of vision and sense of history that make the true internationalist.”
Richard Nixon would not have agreed. As we have seen, he immediately and intuitively disliked “that son of a bitch,” but Nixon’s anger against Canada multiplied after the parliamentary vote condemning the bombing of North Vietnam. By 1973, however, the president was diverted from such matters as the Watergate scandal crept closer to the Oval Office. On November 17 Nixon memorably declared, “I am not a crook,” but most Americans and Canadians believed he was. Trudeau seemed to Canadians a far superior national leader, and by comparison alone, he gained in stature. Trudeau admired Nixon’s intelligence, and in this dark moment, he thought of sending a message to cheer the beleaguered president up—though he didn’t follow through. For Trudeau, life was good that year.22
When things go well, politicians’ thoughts turn to elections, and Trudeau was a typical politician in this respect. He had increasing confidence in the sharp political acumen of Keith Davey and, at his insistence, turned to former Pearson aide Jim Coutts for political advice. Although Coutts, who was devoted to Lester Pearson, had suspicions about Trudeau, they unexpectedly struck up a strong political friendship. The diminutive Coutts, of cherubic appearance, was a worldly bachelor with a sharp eye for detail, and his intelligence and attractive female companions impressed Trudeau. From these new colleagues Trudeau learned that polls were signals, sometimes to be followed and often to be ignored. The winds were blowing favourably as winter ended in 1974, but a shift could come quickly.
Darkening economic clouds meant that delaying the election could bring defeat. Despite the government’s attempt to cushion the blow of the oil crisis by controlling prices, inflation spiked dramatically in 1973. The consumer price index had risen from 100 in 1971 to a troubling 104.8 in 1972 to an astonishing 112.7 in 1973, with the major increases coming in food (100 to 123.3). At the same time, unemployment remained relatively high at 5.6 percent in 1973, with significant regional variations.23 Unemployment was a nagging concern; inflation a new fear. In September 1973 the government moved to alleviate some distress by increasing family allowances and making inflation adjustments on payments, but the increased price of energy meant continuous and accelerated inflation in the new year.
On March 27, 1974, the federal government and the provinces, including Alberta, agreed, after an angry and alcohol-free lunch at 24 Sussex Drive, to a wellhead price for oil of $6.50 and a federal export tax that would assist eastern consumers. On the following afternoon, as Trudeau entered the House of Commons, Liberals greeted him with a standing ovation, a reflection of the praise the agreement had received in eastern Canadian editorials. As Trudeau spoke in the House, an angry Alberta government announced, without informing the federal government, that it would impose a new royalty rate effective April 1 that would bring the province $900 million. Trudeau and Donald Macdonald were furious: the prime minister had warned in an earlier letter to Lougheed that the higher incomes of the producing provinces could render equalization impossible and that these provinces should deal with the “depleting and wasting nature” of their resource exploitation and devote funds to energy development. He further noted, with specific reference to corporate income tax, that “the needs of the federal government to be able to share to a reasonably appropriate degree in the various streams of income across the country are self-evident.” Historically, Trudeau added, “it has not been difficult to reconcile the interests of the federal and provincial governments in this regard.” Alas, the statement was poor history and false prophecy.24
As the fracas erupted, Turner was in the midst of budget preparations, and this placed him in a position where he had to respond, simultaneously, to Alberta’s tax and to new demands from the NDP. David Lewis had produced what he called a “shopping list” that had to be incorporated into the budget if his party was to continue supporting the government. It included the end of the corporate tax concessions that Turner had cleverly put through some months before, the end of tax concessions to resource industries, a personal income-tax cut, a prices review board, a lower age for pensions, and even the nationalization of the CPR. It was too much for Turner and for the government. Instead, the finance minister presented a budget on May 6 that offended everyone: his own Finance Department bureaucrats because of the introduction of a Registered Home Ownership Savings Plan; the NDP because many items on the shopping list were absent; and Lougheed because Alberta was not permitted to deduct its new royalties. Nevertheless, the budget appealed to central Canadians with its nationalist tone, several tax cuts, and a slight rise in corporation taxes. Lougheed bitterly attacked the decision regarding oil royalties, claiming that the budget “would seriously jeopardize the Canadian petroleum industry and the livelihood of many Canadians.” “If the measures are implemented,” he wrote to Trudeau on June 27, “we anticipate a significant decline in exploration and hence a reduction in Canadian reserves of both oil and natural gas. The consequence could well be an energy shortage in Canada in about eight years.”25 In Ottawa, no one was listening.
Seven weeks earlier, on May 8, the government had fallen when the New Democrats joined with the other parties to defeat it. The election was called for July 8. Trudeau had already set the tone for the campaign during the budget debate when he’d mocked Lewis as “David, the daisy, plucking his petals one by one: Will we have an election? Will we not have an election?” Then he infuriated Robert Stanfield by painting him as a friend of separatists in Quebec and of oil barons in Alberta. The leaders left the Commons in an angry mood, ready for a bitter campaign. Trudeau feigned fury when the opposition defeated his government, but he later admitted that his party “actually engineered [its] own defeat in the House of Commons.” Over lunch at Ottawa’s Cercle Universitaire, Turner, Trudeau, and MacEachen had plotted to offend both Tories and socialists in the budget and to make Canadians believe that the opposition had “forced” the election. In less than two years, Trudeau had learned the political game well.26
His opponents had not. The Conservatives read the polls and believed, correctly, that Canadians feared inflation. Almost nine out of ten said they believed that inflation was the major issue. From these results, they concluded that a promise to impose wage and price controls would gain public favour and electoral victory. The NDP thought, probably correctly, that such controls would hurt their labour supporters most, and they turned their political fury toward the Tories. Although the Liberals and the Finance Department had considered controls, Trud
eau had made no commitments and had opposed the idea publicly. He saw immediately that Stanfield and the Conservatives had given him a large and inviting target. As his campaign manager Keith Davey put it, “I knew we would win the election—we had the numbers.”27
The numbers were good. The Liberals would win—at least as another minority government. When the writ fell, the Grits stood at 40 percent, the Tories at 33 percent, and the NDP at percent, while 46 percent believed that Trudeau “would make the best prime minister for Canada,” compared with only percent for Stanfield. But numbers can change, as Trudeau had learned in the last weeks of the 1972 campaign. This time he would leave no room for error. Trudeau had spent the minority years meeting party supporters whom he had ignored during his first four years, and in 1974 they came to hear and watch a transformed leader, one whose speeches brimmed with emotion, wit, sarcasm, eloquence, and a welcome thirst for power. The insouciant, even lacklustre Trudeau who had feigned disregard for political emotion was buried in the rubble of that previous campaign.28
Margaret knew how much her husband wanted to win, and she immediately insisted that she join the campaign, even though she was still nursing Sacha. Initially, Pierre fiercely resisted, and others who knew Margaret’s feisty character also had their doubts. In the end, however, she prevailed over the doubters—to the Liberals’ great benefit. Meanwhile, Trudeau had amassed a group of principal campaign partners who contrasted sharply with his 1972 entourage of intellectuals, computer nerds, and systems analysts: Keith Davey, the towering, garrulous, gossipy backroom operator, ran the campaign, while Jim Coutts, the effervescent political enthusiast, handled the media. Davey soothed the hurts and inspired the troops; Coutts kept the message clear; and Margaret, unforgettably, softened Pierre.
Margaret wrote the best account of the campaign, which she and Pierre began on an old-fashioned train in New Brunswick. As it whistled its way through small Atlantic towns, she and Pierre emerged from their car, the last on the train, and waved to ever more enthusiastic crowds. The weather was foul that Atlantic spring, but the warmth was enormous when Margaret emerged with Sacha and the crowd cheered: “Hurray for the baby.” On Bible Hill in Stanfield’s Nova Scotia, Trudeau told the crowd, “I can tell you the secret of my new deal this time. I have a train and I have Margaret.” The press loved it. As a Toronto Star reporter enthused: “The paparazzi [went] mad. They can’t find enough phones at the 15-minute station stops to file their 30-second in-depth reports. They’re dashing into houses, tearing the phones apart to attach their tape recorders, while wailing housewives demand to know about the phone bill.” The train immediately captured the public imagination, but there was no time to rest. The trip west began after only a short stop in Ottawa to check on Justin.29
A former nun, Mary Ann Conlon, accompanied the Trudeaus and converted their hotel rooms into nurseries while senior political assistants carted along Sacha’s stuffed bears and baby carriages. In those days reporters smoked and created a foul stench that probably contributed to Pierre’s visible contempt for them, but the family scene charmed the most hard-bitten journalists and Trudeau skeptics. Pierre recovered the touch of 1968 as he flirted with women, played with the kids, and gained energy from the crowd. He was spontaneous, taking advantage of every opportunity. If he spied a swimming pool, he dove into it. Margaret enjoyed most of the antics and activities but resented the rough handling she got from security people in large crowds. After one occasion when a security person jostled her, she shouted, “Take your fucking arm off me.” After that instruction, security people kept their distance and, fortunately for the Liberal campaign, their silence.
As expected and initially feared, Margaret was unpredictable. She would walk off the platform if she was the only woman there and join the women sitting in the front row—a gesture that appealed to feminists but bothered campaign officials. She battled continually with Ivan Head, whose speeches, written for Trudeau, she found “full of heavy rhetoric and ponderous, interminable paragraphs meaning nothing.” In Saskatchewan she listened to Pierre bore a crowd. Then, after faint applause for him, she rose, apologized for not having a prepared speech, and talked spontaneously about Liberal programs for the family. The crowds began to cheer, as they had not for Pierre. The intervention infuriated some politicians, but Pierre supported Margaret—he threw away his own prepared speeches and began to speak from the heart himself.
Margaret revealed her heart and set the tone for the rest of the Liberal campaign on June 4 at a high school auditorium in her native British Columbia. She knew Pierre not as a politician, she said, but “as a person, as a loving human being, who has taught me in the three years we have been married and in the few years before that, a lot about loving, Not just loving each other, which is pretty nice, but love for humanity—a tolerance toward the individual that reaches out very far.” Some said he was arrogant, but Margaret did not know that man. To her, Pierre had never been arrogant: “He’s shy and he’s modest, and very, very kind.” What better political reference for a balding fifty-three-year-old? It was not completely convincing, but it thoroughly surprised and charmed the student crowd.
Alberta, however, was hostile the next day: four hundred protesters mobbed Trudeau in Calgary, carrying signs reading “Alberta Oil lubricates Socialist machine” and “Sacha can’t find oil.” When Trudeau walked down the street, only twelve people shook his hand, including a Quebecer, a Mexican, and an American. But Alberta represented only 7 percent of Canada’s voters in 1974. Trudeau could smile and say, “Usually when I land in a city I hope to go away with a few seats. But for a while today I thought I would be lucky to escape with my skin.” When Lougheed tried to help the Conservatives by issuing his angry denunciation of the Liberal energy policy in the second-last week of the election, he probably helped the Liberal cause in Ontario. Sensing that advantage, Trudeau did not bother to reply to Lougheed.
The eastern business community was uneasy with Alberta’s aggressiveness and with wage and price controls, and the Liberals looked more attractive. In the final week, the highly influential Paul Desmarais of Power Corporation* wrote to Trudeau to “tell [him] that I think you are conducting one hell of a campaign. Margaret’s smile is a knockout. Millions of Canadians would rather look at her than any of our odd collection of Canadian politicians.”30
Trudeau mocked the “NDP circus of slogans” as well as the Tories’ proposed wage and price controls, saying his opponents planned to control inflation by waving a wand and declaring, “Zap, you’re frozen.” He pointed to Liberal budget measures lowering taxes on essential items, raising the duty-free allowance, and eliminating taxes for the poor. He promised that the Liberals would defeat inflation. As the campaign progressed, more Canadians appeared to believe him.
By the end of the campaign, inflation was no longer the major issue. It had been replaced by leadership—Keith Davey’s choice of terrain for the election fight. Trudeau shunned the radio talk shows he had favoured in 1972, and Davey effectively controlled his appearances. These tactics worked, although they apparently caused some tension in the campaign itself.31 Press treatment of Trudeau and the Liberals was good. Seven of Trudeau’s ten major policy statements appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail throughout the campaign. Overall, the Liberals had twelve front-page stories in the Globe, ten of them positive, while the Conservatives appeared only five times, with two stories being negative ones about Leonard Jones, the Conservative mayor of Moncton who denounced Stanfield’s support for bilingualism.32 Stanfield scored well on integrity, but Trudeau dominated the polls on all other items, including handling of the economy. The majority of Canadians told pollsters that he had “changed his attitude” since 1972 and had become “less arrogant; more humble; easier to get along with … more human; calmed down.”33 On June 19 he even entertained the press corps at 24 Sussex Drive, an invitation that stunned journalists who had long endured Trudeau’s stares of withering contempt. They, too, had calmed down.
The electorate was also calmer than Trudeau and the Liberals had any right to expect. Although inflation had waned as an issue in the campaign, it remained a reality with the shocking news on June 12 that the Consumer Price Index had risen 10.9 percent since May 1973. What would become the “Misery Index,” the combination of unemployment and inflation, stood at record highs, but remarkably, it did not move the polls: there the Liberals maintained a solid lead, the Conservatives were stagnant, and the NDP began to lose votes to the Liberals as workers decided to vote against the Tory plan to freeze their wages.
The campaign ended with an astonishing picnic on Toronto Island, organized by the Ontario campaign under the expert leadership of Dorothy Petrie, at which a casually but stylishly clad Pierre and Margaret both spoke to more than a hundred thousand cheering Liberals. They returned to Ottawa on election night, thoroughly exhausted but proud of what they had done. As the returns came in, the Liberal tide rose in the East; swept across Quebec, where the Liberals took 60 of 74 seats; and gained power in Ontario, where Liberals won 55 of 88 seats—an increase of 19 over the previous election. Liberal support ebbed quickly in the West, although there were two more seats in Saskatchewan and four more in British Columbia. Trudeau had his majority with 141 seats, none of them from Alberta. The results in the West were ominous, but forgotten as Trudeau and his campaign celebrated wildly on election night. Davey, the political guru of the day, declared: “I can tell you the secret of this election in three words—Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It was his victory.”34