by John English
Still, there were limits on his freedom. When he returned from Tibet, sporting his grey and, frankly, scraggly beard, he asked Jim Coutts what he thought of it. Coutts replied, “If you’re staying in politics, shave it immediately.” And he did. He was not ready to leave yet. Although there were troubles in the Quebec wing when younger MPs rebelled against the appointment of Trudeau’s old friend Jean Marchand as caucus chair, the impending referendum imposed unity on the party.22 In late September the energized Trudeau impressed the late summer caucus, though he had angered them all when he decided to fly to China and Tibet on the eve of the recall of Parliament. The respite was temporary, as dissatisfaction emerged again during a gathering of Liberals in Winnipeg in mid-October, where whispers about leadership change were frequent. But when Parliament finally opened on October 9, Trudeau was very much in control. The shadow Cabinet was decidedly to the left of his earlier Cabinets, with Herb Gray, who was then considered a leftist and a nationalist, named as the Liberal’s finance critic.
When Trudeau asked Clark his first question in the House, he spoke in restrained and “mock humble” tones about Clark’s failure to reach agreement on energy prices—a reminder of how often the Conservatives had attacked him for his government’s failure to handle Premier Lougheed properly. Clark did not know what to do with the “cuddly boa constrictor” appearing across from him, but he responded, as did his ministers, with strong answers. Then, as the debate began, Trudeau’s restraint vanished. He attacked the Clark government’s proposed sale of Petro-Canada, mocked its inability to find an energy price despite its kowtowing to the provinces, ridiculed its backing down on its election pledge to move the Canadian Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and excoriated Clark’s notion of Canada as a “community of communities.” The Liberal backbenchers cheered him on with cries of “resign, resign,” hurled not at Trudeau but at the Tory ranks.23
Canadians agreed with the Liberal backbenchers. The Clark government had fumbled badly. It had delayed much too long in recalling Parliament, and the promise to move the embassy revealed a troubling naiveté in foreign affairs. Clark appointed Robert Stanfield to investigate what should be done, and, predictably and wisely, the former Conservative leader recommended “Nothing.” The pledge seemed like cheap politics to win Jewish votes, made worse by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s threat that he would turn Jewish voters against Trudeau if he did not support Clark in making the embassy move happen. In this unfortunate episode, Begin, a rightist whom Trudeau despised because of the threat, bestowed considerable credibility on Trudeau as a wise international figure.
Domestically, Clark found his fellow Conservative and Albertan Peter Lougheed as difficult to deal with as Trudeau had. While Premier William Davis decried Alberta’s insistence on moving quickly to the world price for oil and made the point that there were far more Conservative MPs from Ontario than from Alberta, Lougheed continued to insist that Canada pay that price, even as it rose rapidly because of the crisis in Iran. Clark’s advisers also came to believe that Lougheed, a former football star, moved the goalposts farther away each time Alberta thought it had scored a deal. By the end of October, Clark was sufficiently angry to inform the House of Commons that he would use federal legal powers to make certain that Alberta oil continued to flow east. Trudeau revelled in this public spat among Tories and took every opportunity he could in Parliament to proclaim a plague on the houses of Clark and Lougheed, although not on those of Conservative premiers William Davis in Ontario and Richard Hatfield in New Brunswick. That distinction would become important later. The beneficiary of the Tory feuds and Clark’s stumbles was the Liberal Party, which moved up sharply in the Gallup poll from a five-point lead (42% to 37%) in October to a nineteen-point lead (47% to 28%) in November—a margin that, if maintained in an election campaign, would bring a strong majority government.24
An exultant Trudeau lashed out at Conservative incompetence and called on Liberals to “throw out” the Tories. He did not follow through on his challenge, however, nor did he repeat the charge in the House. When Keith Davey told him that the November polls would be very good for the Liberal Party, he replied that House leader Allan MacEachen had told him the NDP intended to give the Tories a year to govern. With no election on the horizon, Trudeau then seemed to lose his ardour for politics, becoming ever more listless both in Question Period and in his leadership. In early November he told British Columbia Liberals that he could not attend a weekend policy seminar because he had a dreadful cold. Unfortunately, a photographer outside New York’s elite Club Ibis caught him that same weekend squiring a glamorous woman into the disco. Art Phillips, a new and highly promising Vancouver MP, reported that the people back home were very upset, while Trudeau’s intended host, Liberal activist Shirley McLaughlin, said that Trudeau’s “fib” “really made her mad.” In the House of Commons, NDP leader Ed Broadbent moved a motion declaring that disco dancing be made tax-deductible for curing colds. On the CBC news report, the Trudeau story followed an item about seniors and bingo. Host Knowlton Nash could not resist providing a transition: not all sixty-year-olds played bingo, he intoned, and some loved disco dancing. CBC political analyst and future Conservative senator Mike Duffy suggested that Trudeau’s insouciant reaction to the publicity—“Why no, I can’t imagine they’re upset”—meant that Trudeau had “little interest in rebuilding” the Liberal Party.25
Since his marriage breakdown, Trudeau had often found excuses to skip party events in favour of weekend dates, but this time he’d been caught. Chastened, even though he had just had painful root-canal surgery, he agreed to attend an Ontario Liberal convention at Toronto’s Harbour Castle hotel the next weekend, November 14–16, and to face the feisty student Liberals in a question and answer session. In a hot, sweaty room, with TV lights glaring, Trudeau talked about Liberalism with deep feeling, “picking up cues from the entranced young audience.” Gossage was impressed: “Somehow he was not in that sweaty room; he was not being fried by four TV lights right under his nose; he was not barely balanced on a rickety chair; he had not just had oral surgery that left one side of his face swollen. He was as if in a big hall; cool, rested, and preoccupied solely with what he was saying.” Watching the performance, Mike Duffy changed his mind: Trudeau was staying, he reckoned, and ready to fight new wars.26
In the corridors, however, the chatter about leadership continued. A party convention was scheduled for the late winter, where members would vote on whether there should be a leadership convention. At a reception for constituency presidents, Trudeau seemed bored and tired. His face was swollen, the pock marks were surprisingly evident, and he did seem to be recovering from a cold. To add a personal aside, my wife and I had our first conversation with him during that reception, and he initially appeared inattentive. Then he spied, on a nearby table, Between Friends / Entre Amis, the book of photographs the Canadian government gave as a curious bicentenary gift to the United States in 1976. “Could you bring it here?” he asked. We opened the book to the page where M. and Mme René Deschenes of Ste-Anne-de-Madawaska, two seniors, sat on a well-stuffed couch. An earnest M. Deschenes has his arm around his smiling, stouter wife in a room with two television sets, a dominating painting of the Nativity, a bejewelled cross, one portrait of the Virgin Mary, another of Christ, and between them, a small portrait of Pierre, Margaret, Justin, and Sacha. Trudeau’s eyes suddenly lit up and the familiar smile radiated as his finger jabbed at the page: “There we are.”*
Four days later, on November 20, before the regular Wednesday morning caucus, Trudeau unexpectedly called senior staff to his office and, one by one, Cécile Viau led them in to meet Trudeau. When they left, their faces were downcast and some were weeping. Then he walked into the caucus meeting at ten o’clock and said, simply, “It’s all over.” He had decided to resign as party leader. Now tears welled in Trudeau’s eyes, too, as he began to read his statement: “You’ve always known I’m an old softie,” he declared, a remark that softened oth
ers and brought the handkerchiefs out. Clad in a tan corduroy suit and wearing a yellow rose, Trudeau next walked across Wellington Street to the National Press Club. He read a brief statement blandly, rarely looking up, and gave few hints about his future except to say that he would fight for Canada. When he ended, he crumpled his notes, smiled, and, paraphrasing Richard Nixon’s famous outburst, said to the journalists: “I’m kinda sorry I won’t have you to kick around anymore.” Spontaneously, they applauded.27
Later that afternoon, the House passed a resolution, moved by Prime Minister Joe Clark and seconded by Stanley Knowles, the dean of the House and NDP member for Winnipeg North Centre, thanking Trudeau for his enormous contributions to Canada. Knowles was warm in his praise, though he acknowledged that Trudeau was controversial. Nevertheless, he added, “one way not to receive criticism is to do nothing at all,” and no one could deny that Trudeau had done something. In response Trudeau was once again restrained, perhaps because he feared tears would appear once more. He spoke briefly, his elbow held by one hand as his finger moved about his chin: he paid tribute to the importance of public life, of the commitment of all the members to Canada. The only slightly partisan note was sounded by Allan MacEachen, who said he regretted the resignation because he had believed that Trudeau would soon lead the party into office once again. Although many had expected his departure, his decision caused a flurry of comment as Canadian journalists and others rushed to judgment on his long political career—a prime-ministerial tenure exceeded only by Macdonald, Laurier, and King, the giants of Canadian political history. Did Trudeau belong in their ranks? they asked.28
In the first major biography of Trudeau written after he resigned, The Northern Magus, Richard Gwyn said that, “except for Quebec commentators who were kind to their own, the editorialists and pundits, in a rough preview of what the history books would say, gave Trudeau more minuses than pluses,” although he correctly claimed that “ordinary Canadians” were not nearly as negative in their assessment.29 Whatever the actual view of main-street Canada (and Gwyn suggests that, based on the surge in Liberal support in the fall of 1979, “ordinary Canadians missed Trudeau”), his description of the “editorialists and pundits” is largely correct. They were, on the whole, negative and surprisingly unreflective. The Globe and Mail, astonishingly, did not write an editorial on Trudeau’s departure, although several columnists expressed their diverse and generally critical opinions. Geoffrey Stevens wrote the longest piece, entitled “The Singer Who Couldn’t Sing Any More,” while the increasingly conservative Richard Needham declared: “I’ll say of Pierre Trudeau’s resignation what I said of Harold Wilson’s resignation in the U.K.: when a man’s done all the damage he possibly can, it’s time for him to step down and let someone else take a bang at it.”
As with his Liberal predecessors Lester Pearson and William Lyon Mackenzie King, the political obituaries mirrored recent controversies rather than mature reflection. Some commentators did try to place Trudeau’s career within a broader historical context, while recognizing that Clio, the muse of history, has notoriously fickle opinions. Trudeau himself refrained from reflecting on his contributions in his generally restrained and not at all eloquent farewells. In an interview with Michel Roy of Le Devoir, he was forceful when speaking of the impending referendum but refused to discuss his own place in history. Gossage, who accompanied Trudeau, was puzzled but impressed: “A man who keeps no diary, he is like a thirty-year-old whose past weighs little against the challenge of the present. He was writing, with his ideas and actions, a new chapter in his life. His age meant nothing. He was taking his space with him.”30
The trait persisted—Trudeau refused to look back. But others did, believing that his impact on Canada should be understood by all who contemplated the nation’s future.* Two of the most thoughtful appraisals came from opponents. On the right, Allan Gregg, a young adviser to Conservative leader Joe Clark, wrote a memorandum nine days after Trudeau’s electoral defeat. Although Trudeau had lost, he mused, his presence still dominated: “Unlike Trudeau, Clark has never been able to engender unanimous concurrence as to his leadership qualities on any dimension, be it honesty, toughness, competence etc. This in itself is not that uncommon in as much as ‘style’ over the last ten years had been defined by Trudeau himself and notions of what ‘Trudeau is’ have taken root over ten years.” Rarely, if ever, had a Canadian politician so dominated his times as Pierre Trudeau had during the seventies.
On the left, political scientist Reg Whitaker, who had written the definitive history of the Liberal Party under King, published a thoughtful article, in which he deprecated the tendency to dismiss Trudeau as “an anachronism, passed over by the rush of events.” Trudeau might be out of office and favour, he wrote, but remained “close to the heart of our central dilemmas.” Although he was critical of many of Trudeau’s actions and contradictions, he questioned whether there were better ideas than Trudeau’s to confront two major challenges: the threat posed by neo-conservatism to North American liberalism, and the ultimatum presented by a francophone population in Quebec tempted by notions of political freedom:
Are there any among us who could remain entirely unmoved by [Trudeau’s] appeal after the PQ victory, that Levesque [sic] had surrounded himself with blood brothers, but that he, Trudeau, wished to speak to us of a loyalty higher than to blood alone? Which critic of his mechanistic liberalism could tell us, in good conscience, of a community Good which could replace individual pursuit of goods, without entailing the kind of civil conflict which Trudeau has always sought to avoid? … Coming to terms with both the strengths and the failures of Pierre Trudeau in his extraordinary passage across our intellectual and political life means coming to terms with some of the central values and central conundrums in the present crisis.31
In terms of style, Trudeau had electrified the Canadian political stage since his first dramatic appearances in 1968. On substance, however, disagreements abound. How much did Trudeau change Canada and how beneficial were those changes? If Trudeau had left politics forever in November 1979, would he have been, as George Radwanski suggests in his biography published the year before, an “unfulfilled” prime minister, whose promise was largely unrealized? In some respects, Trudeau would have agreed with Radwanski’s assessment when he stepped aside. His hopes for a charter of rights and the patriation of the Canadian Constitution had not been achieved. Moreover, the election of René Lévesque in November 1976, which destroyed those hopes, represented a significant defeat for Trudeau, who had minimized the possibility of separatism in the mid-seventies. Trudeau’s critics rightly pointed to his bad relationship with Robert Bourassa as a factor in Lévesque’s victory. Without doubt, his dismissive approach to others who were federalists but did not share his views was unhelpful.
Many Trudeau supporters, and even Cabinet colleagues who shared his animosity toward separatism, were troubled by the tactics he employed to confront separatists, particularly the role of the police. Trudeau’s reputation as a civil libertarian, forged in the heated encounters with Duplessis and Quebec authorities in the fifties and sixties, seemed at odds with the harsh use of authority during the October Crisis in 1970 and the illegal activities of the RCMP in countering separatism. Trudeau supporters pointed to the unusual nature of the challenge from Quebec, the advice he received from his brawling labour union friend Jean Marchand, and the incompetence and independence of the RCMP Security Service. And yet, even when these factors are taken into account, Trudeau’s positions and actions while prime minister reflect a hardened view of the rights of the individual vis-à-vis the claims of the state.
Although the presence of separatist “spies” was a serious security issue, the federal response to RCMP illegal activities, which occurred throughout Canada and not simply in Quebec, was ineffective and sometimes careless. Trudeau’s anger, combined with the many inadequacies of the RCMP Security Service, was a factor, but so was his emphasis on the proper balance between security and indivi
dual rights—a balance he now saw differently than he had in the fifties and sixties, when he’d railed against the possibility of identity cards. Despite his mission to enshrine individual rights in a charter, Trudeau believed those rights possessed limits when the collective security of citizens was threatened. When socialist Ken McNaught, who had supported Trudeau during the October Crisis, sent the prime minister a commentary on a document from the McDonald Commission (which had investigated the excesses of the RCMP in confronting violence), Trudeau wrote this fascinating response: “The [document] represents a refreshing (but—from you—not unexpected!) change from the usual muddled thinking on the subject of freedom and order. Lawyers and judges properly define law as ‘those wise restraints that make men free’; but they are nearly always concerned with individual freedom, not collective, not the freedom which calls for ‘social engineering.’”32
For Trudeau, the balance had tipped. He had adjusted to the “new reality,” where he believed Canadian democracy faced threats from extra-parliamentary groups that in some cases openly espoused violence. Further, well before the October Crisis, he had expressed his strong opposition to violent acts in support of Quebec independence, notably in his break with his early mentor François Hertel and his successor as editor of Cité libre, Pierre Vallières. After the October Crisis, he worried about the penetration of federal institutions by separatist forces, believing, correctly, that separatists not only used spies to discover what Ottawa intended, but on occasion continued to think of violence as a means to achieve their goals.* While Trudeau had his own doubts about the RCMP Security Service, which lacked both a civilian presence and proper civilian oversight, he believed that the ends of maintaining democratic order and law justified sometimes clumsy means. All the same, the McDonald Commission rightly concluded that Trudeau had tolerated RCMP wrongdoing too long and, in particular, that his government’s instructions to the RCMP to investigate separatist groups were too broad.