Just Watch Me

by John English

  The discussion with Enders revealed Trudeau’s views on the economy, as well as his increasing pessimism about Canadian domestic politics. After the 1974 election, Trudeau’s major difficulty in federal-provincial relations appeared to be with the western provinces, especially Alberta. In his election night speech, he regretted the Liberals’ poor results in the West and indicated that he intended to conduct a government for all Canadians. It represented a peace offering to Peter Lougheed, whose strongly critical letter to Trudeau published late in the campaign struck many Liberals as unfair. The bitter dispute over the spoils of the oil patch cleared up as soon as the big oil companies responded to Edmonton’s and Ottawa’s grabs for revenue by pulling out their drilling rigs. The quarrels continued, of course, because the stakes remained huge, but the relationship was greatly improved by two factors: the replacement of Donald Macdonald by Alastair Gillespie as minister of energy in the fall of 1975 and the Trudeau government’s decision to raise oil prices, necessitated by a large budgetary deficit incurred, in part, by the energy subsidy.

  In 1975 Lougheed and Trudeau also worked together well when they faced a crisis in the development of the oil sands, already believed to be the jewel of Alberta’s energy resources. Atlantic Richfield, which owned 30 percent of Syncrude, announced that it was withdrawing from the consortium that was poised to develop the sands. In Winnipeg on February 3, 1975, the federal government agreed to take 15 percent of Syncrude’s shares, Alberta agreed to take 10 percent, and energy-poor Ontario agreed to take 5 percent. Macdonald, who had called Lougheed “vicious” and his energy minister Don Getty “dripping with venom,” described the mood in February as cordial. Lougheed, in turn, told his provincial legislature that the Syncrude settlement and the federal government’s willingness to move toward higher prices had created a “sense of stability” in the oil patch. This historic decision ensured that many years later the oil sands would indeed become an economic jewel, although Ottawa’s critical intervention was rarely recalled.

  The federal energy strategy released in the fall of 1976 pointed out that one of the major problems the federal government faced was the resistance of the “consuming provinces” to the decision to move the Canadian price for oil closer to the world price.25 Of course, the federal government managed to irritate Albertans as well, and polls indicated that the era of good feelings after the summer of 1975 did not convince Albertans to vote Liberal. The creation of Petro-Canada and the announcement that it would be Canada’s “window” on the energy world outraged many in the oil patch, as did the appointment of Justice Thomas Berger, a former leader of the British Columbia NDP, to investigate the building of the proposed Mackenzie Valley natural gas pipeline.* Trudeau’s Christmas musings of 1975 also seemed to confirm deep suspicions about the socialist views of the Liberal leader. However, it was Quebec, not Alberta, that presented Trudeau with his greatest political problems.

  In his election night victory speech in July 1974, Trudeau expressed regret for his poor showing in western Canada but made no references to Quebec, where the Liberals had done very well. Robert Bourassa had won his overwhelming victory in 1973, and the federal Liberals had triumphed in 1974. Central Canada prospered in 1973 and 1974, and the federal government shielded Quebec, which used imported oil, from the OPEC shock by subsidizing imports to the province. Bourassa did irritate Trudeau, particularly in his musings about “cultural sovereignty” and a Canadian “common market,” but Trudeau responded gently, knowing that a Quebec premier had distinct political needs. Times seemed good. Trudeau told a Montreal Liberal audience in January 1975 that “at one time there was talk of Quebec having a special status, but, fortunately, that is now a dead issue.” And in the winter of 1975, Bourassa said that relations between Ottawa and Quebec City had “never been better.” Certainly, he worried about his province and his language, but “today,” he said, “with Pierre at Ottawa, we are in no danger.”26 There were serious differences between the two governments, particularly on Bill 22, which made French the official language of Quebec, limited the right of francophones and allophones to send their children to English schools, and placed restrictions on advertising only in English. However, Trudeau resisted calls to disallow the bill, even though difficulties were created because Bourassa introduced it just as the federal government was “having a lot of trouble selling … [its] concept of bilingualism to the rest of the country.”

  Gradually, however, the old distrust returned. Bourassa, Trudeau concluded, was “politically stupid,” and he said so publicly. When school opened in the fall of 1975, the Bourassa government relented as a result of arguments from the fervently Liberal Italian community and gave a few more spaces in the English system to Italian-Canadian students. Then, suddenly, Bourassa’s education minister, Jérôme Choquette, resigned in opposition to the decision and formed a new party, the Parti nationale populaire, which was designed to appeal to conservative nationalists.27

  By this time, the Parti Québécois had reacted to its disastrous defeat in 1973 by stating that, once elected, it would hold a referendum on sovereignty, rather than leading the province immediately into independence. It took “clean government” as its slogan—and this proved effective. Bourassa had rushed development of the gigantic James Bay hydroelectricity project just as Mayor Jean Drapeau won the 1976 Olympic Games for Montreal. The resulting strain on the construction industry caused a breakdown in labour relations throughout Quebec and, not surprisingly, cost overruns and inflated wages among the trades. Soon, tales of corruption, payoffs to get work done, and sweetheart political deals were told everywhere. Bourassa responded in May 1974 by appointing a special commission chaired by Judge Robert Cliche, the former leader of the provincial New Democrats, assisted by labour leader Guy Chevrette and labour lawyer Brian Mulroney. Sensational testimony to the committee outraged the public and fascinated the tabloids. Suddenly, Mulroney was a celebrity in Quebec—a circumstance that would have lasting consequences for Canada. The final report said that the commissioners “were too often faced with swindlers, crooks, and scoundrels.” The head of the public service commission was judged to have shown “a serious breach of ethics,” and the government was deeply wounded by the report it had itself commissioned.

  Labour troubles continued, Olympic costs soared, and services were intermittent as workers closed down plants and roads throughout Montreal. Bourassa seemed ineffective in response. Claude Forget, a minister in the government at the time, later recalled his own frustration with Bourassa: “There was no corruption on any extensive scale, certainly not at the level of Cabinet members. But innuendoes and half-truths were used very skillfully; they played well in the media and thus created an image problem, which was compounded by Bourassa’s personality. Not being confrontational, he would simply decline to answer or … say, ‘Well, this is not true; why should we bother about that?’”28

  As both federal and provincial governments stumbled through the recession, Trudeau and Bourassa began to tussle about a range of issues, including the financing of the Olympics, the patriation of the Canadian Constitution, and the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to open the Olympics. On some of the larger issues, progress occurred. The federal government’s proposal for the end of conditional grants and the presentation of an Established Programs Financing Proposal pleased Bourassa, although he wanted all funds to come without any conditions. It was, however, the patriation of the Constitution that caused the most mischief. Trudeau had raised the issue in April 1975 when the mood between Ottawa and both East and West was good. The inevitable qualifications, disagreements, and fears soon arose, and Bourassa’s opposition hardened in early 1976. He met Trudeau for a disagreeable two-hour lunch at the Quebec federal Liberal convention in early March. When an irritated Trudeau saw reporters there, he declared, in a vengeful spirit, that he had no intention of paying a penny for the Olympics. Then, before the Liberal crowd at the convention, he cut away at Bourassa for his fussing about the royal visit and especially for
his refusal to work with him to patriate the Constitution. Did he want Canada and Quebec to be subject to the British Parliament? Did Canadians and Quebecers? Speaking without notes, Trudeau pressed his arguments with slang and invective when necessary. With contempt, he ridiculed his luncheon host: “I brought my lunch. He’s coming. Apparently the guy eats nothing but hot dogs.” The image stuck: the feckless, hopeless Bourassa ate “hot dogs.”29

  In this troubled climate, the language that airline pilots spoke suddenly became an abrasive issue that shaved away the civility of Canadian public life. English had been the language of air traffic control in Canada, but a 1962 directive allowed the use of French in emergency situations. French was used by pilots in Quebec, but the Official Languages Act led to a Transport study that suggested in 1973 that air traffic controllers in Quebec should be bilingual. Minister Jean Marchand set up a commission the following January to make recommendations on language use, but its appointment provoked the Canadian Association of Air Line Pilots to write to Marchand, declaring that “English must be the exclusive language of Air Traffic Control communications.”30 When Marchand’s committee reported, it recommended that the use of French was appropriate in Quebec and the Ottawa area. Tempers flared, and the anglophone pilots and controllers firmly rejected the report.

  When Otto Lang replaced Marchand at Transport in September 1975, he tried to achieve conciliation while insisting that there was a place for French in the air. He achieved little, as pilots and controllers began wildcat walkouts in June 1976, and international airlines, egged on by the Canadian pilots and controllers, announced a safety quarantine of Canadian airspace on June 24. The previous day, the government had appointed a commission to look into the safety of French in the air. French pilots organized their own union, Les Gens de l’air, to advance their case. Trudeau appeared on television to beg for reason, as francophones united to defend their language, and anglophone newspapers, with the notable exception of the Toronto Star and the English-language Montreal papers, insisted that safety alone should be the relevant issue. He pointed out that bilingual air traffic control worked well in many countries, that there were many unilingual French pilots in Quebec, and that safety would not be compromised. “What [the pilots and controllers] seem to be protesting, therefore, is the very idea of even looking at the possibility of having safe bilingual control at Montreal.” Eventually, on June 26, Otto Lang, acting as mediator, hammered out an agreement with the anglophone group, but Les Gens de l’air claimed that it had not been consulted and that the agreement broke earlier promises. Trudeau was away at the time, attending a G7 meeting, but on his return he found his Cabinet divided, with the francophones rejecting the agreement. A furious and emotional Marchand then resigned, claiming that he could not remain a minister in a government that accepted such an accord. Trudeau accepted Marchand’s resignation, stating that, “You will continue to make your irreplaceable voice heard and to pit your genuine character as a Québécois and a Canadian against all these false interpretations with which some are trying to subvert Quebec and divert Canada from its calling.” He concluded: “With all my undiminished friendship.”31

  But Trudeau’s government was not intact, and neither was Bourassa’s. With the Olympics over, the air traffic control controversy less bitter, and the economy gradually emerging from recession, Bourassa met Montreal journalist Ian MacDonald for lunch at a private salon at Chez Son Père in September 1976. Over white-fish and Chablis, he told MacDonald that he planned to call an election in order to thwart Trudeau’s attempt to patriate the Constitution. Nearly all the other premiers supported him, and the issue would appeal to francophone voters—who were united as never before in recent memory by the outrages of the air traffic controversies. MacDonald had his doubts, not least because the government was only in the third year of its possible five-year term. But Bourassa’s triumph of 1973 had come after three years, and the precedent was tempting. Besides, there was always the separatist card to play, and polls indicated that support for separation was low. Bourassa fretted that Trudeau’s proposal to patriate the Constitution, as well as a conference on the subject planned for December, would stir dormant separatist and nationalist feeling. So his office arranged for a private meeting between himself and the prime minister at the Hilton in Quebec City on October 5. At the meeting Trudeau remained determined to proceed with the Constitution, even on a unilateral basis if necessary. Despite the risks posed by Trudeau’s position, on October 18 Bourassa called an election for November 15. When asked for his comment later that day, Trudeau would only say, cryptically, “everyone expected it.”32

  Bourassa had made a disastrous decision. The Liberal campaign faltered from the start. When Jean Marchand and Bryce Mackasey announced that they were leaving Ottawa to defeat the separatists and to ensure better language policies, the Quebec Liberals initially hesitated to accept what they considered to be damaged goods.* Eventually, they accepted, though, because rejection would have caused even more difficulties. The anti-separatist card was no longer a high trump because René Lévesque now had the referendum card to play, thus allaying fears that Quebec would leave confederation immediately after a separatist government was elected. Bill 22, Bourassa’s language bill, which in Lévesque’s words imposed “tests … on little shavers six and seven years old isolated from their parents” in order to determine whether immigrant children had “sufficient knowledge” of English, was “a horror” for anglophones.33 And true enough, polls soon revealed that anglophones, a traditional bulwark for Liberals, were defecting to the Union nationale, whose new leader, Rodrigue Biron, favoured official bilingualism and a conservative economic program. A week before the election, the polls were dismal, with the PQ leading the Liberals 50 percent to 27 percent. Bourassa knew he would lose personally, and Claude Ryan prepared to endorse the Parti Québécois on the grounds that it would offer better government.34

  Trudeau was aghast at what was happening. Political analyst Gérard Bergeron later wrote that because of the prime minister’s battles with Bourassa, Trudeau “was the partial and involuntary artisan of the Parti Québécois’ rise to power.” Lévesque’s biographer Pierre Godin agrees that the “passivité” of Bourassa in the face of Trudeau’s insults helped Lévesque’s cause.35 Trudeau would not have agreed, but his well-known contempt for Bourassa surely was a factor. He had concluded that Bourassa was a weak premier whose ambivalence and silences damaged the federal cause in Quebec.

  On election night, the first returns reflected the pre-election polls as PQ support surged in every part of the province, even in the English bastion of West Montreal. With a strong majority assured, the Quebec premier-to-be suddenly found himself surrounded by a bunch of “athletic young men,” who pushed him forward through an “uncontrollable mob” outside the Paul Sauvé arena in the francophone east end of Montreal. Perspiring profusely, Lévesque finally reached the stage and declared, amid a sea of fleur-de-lys and joyous supporters: “I’ve never been so proud to be Québécois. We’re not a little people, we’re closer to something like a great people!” Trudeau went on the air later and grimly told Canadians: “I am confident that Quebecers will continue to reject separatism because they still believe their destiny is linked with an indivisible Canada.” Most observers, however, were not so sure.36 In some ways, Trudeau welcomed Bourassa’s departure and the absence of ambiguity. When Trudeau awoke the morning after the election, he was ready to fight René Lévesque: “I said to myself, ‘Okay, now here’s the adversary out in the open, and we’ll be able to argue this thing to a decision. We’ll see what kind of separatism they want, and what kind of a support they have’ … the fat’s in the fire—let’s see what they’ve got and let’s fight them.” And so Trudeau began the battle of his life.37

  Margaret Trudeau also watched Lévesque on election night as he electrified the chanting crowd at the arena. Her heart sank. Pierre’s fight would continue, but she knew their marriage would die.38

  * Whelan and Pl
umptre crossed the country denouncing each other. They were once in an elevator in the Château Laurier and, in Whelan’s words, “Somebody in the elevator said with a devilish gleam in his eye, ‘Mrs. Plumptre, have you met Mr. Whelan?’ And ‘Mr. Whelan, do you know Mrs. Plumptre?’” Both answered yes and exchanged no other words. It was the only time they ever met. Eugene Whelan with Rick Archbold, Whelan: The Man in the Green Stetson (Toronto: Irwin, 1986), 154.

  * Reisman soon became associated with the conservative Fraser Institute, which business strongly supported. Reisman wrote an essay in the fall of 1976 that appeared in a Fraser publication—Michael Walker, ed., Which Way Ahead? Canada after Wage and Price Control (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1977). He strongly attacked the “gadfly” Galbraith, blamed government spending and unemployment insurance as the main domestic sources of inflation, and castigated Trudeau for his anti-market sentiments and declared they would not be accepted “as long as Canadians retain their political freedom.” Trudeau and his colleagues were understandably outraged.