by John English
What thoughts flowed through his mind as he trod the empty, snow-covered streets of Rockcliffe that night? Surely, he reflected deeply on the implications for his boys. Margaret had settled in Ottawa, but if he retired, he would take the boys with him to Montreal, where they could grow up, as he had, in the world he knew and cherished—one without security details, near to his family, and close to the cottage, Jean-de-Brébeuf college, and the French language, which the youngsters too often resisted in Ottawa’s more English atmosphere. Even though Andras and Buchanan simply irritated him, Trudeau’s mind must also have dwelt on the warnings of Marchand and Lalonde, friends with whom he had shared so many battles in the past. Then there was Macdonald, who had been loyal when others were not and whom he had assured of his support only a few weeks earlier.
But different thoughts also crowded in: a scowling René Lévesque and the separatist banners and hecklers who confronted him regularly on Montreal streets. He could hear Pelletier’s voice telling him that he could not walk away from the challenge: Lévesque had publicly declared that the chances of the “Oui” group had vastly improved with Trudeau’s retirement. Other friends, such as Michael Pitfield, whom Clark had fired as clerk of the Privy Council, wanted him back for the great battle: “Look,” they said, “you can be there at the time of the referendum. You can fight a hell of a lot more effectively if you’re the prime minister.”6 But Trudeau was not yet convinced. When he went to sleep in the early morning hours of December 18, resignation still seemed the best course. But at about 8 a.m., he woke abruptly and said to himself: “My God, I made the wrong decision last night.” According to his Memoirs, Trudeau then called Coutts in the morning to come to 24 Sussex, where they debated the issue, before he finally told his excited aide: “Okay, we’re going to do it.” Coutts believes now that he had already made up his mind but enjoyed the game of discussing the decision.7
Once Trudeau had made up his mind, his doubts vanished. As Jeffrey Simpson remarks, Trudeau “had read the press notices after his resignation and had not liked what he had seen: the general impression was of a man and a Prime Minister who had failed to fulfill the promise expected of him when he took office in 1968.” Now a political miracle had occurred, a second act, and a chance to perform as never before. He had loathed opposition and had missed the perquisites and habits of power. At the press conference at 11 a.m. on December 18, Trudeau announced his return in the slow monotone he favoured for such occasions: “I decided last night, after two days of long consultation with friends and colleagues in the caucus and the party, that because Canada faces most serious problems, because the Government has been defeated, and because our party faces an election, my duty is to accept the draft of my party—that duty was stronger even than my desire to continue with my plan to re-enter private life.” He added that the Liberal Party had “a vision of Canada which I feel is the correct and just vision of Canada.” It was, of course, very much his own. Facing press questions about the announcement, he was insouciant and, in the view of the Globe and Mail editorialist, “lifeless” and “uninterested.” When asked how long he would stay as Liberal leader, Trudeau answered: “If [Canadians] love me so much that they want me forever, the answer is I’m sorry, they can’t have me. But if they want me and the party for a few years, well, we’re here.” He seemed impatient, even walking out in the midst of a question from the respected CBC correspondent David Halton. The journalists winced—Trudeau was back to kick them around once more.8
Thus began Trudeau’s most unusual election campaign—and one of the strangest in Canadian history. Joe Clark, confident that Trudeau’s return would quickly cause a drop in Liberal support, began his campaign with enthusiasm, a clear policy, and a vastly improved organization. Trudeau’s election meetings across the country were brief, just long enough to capture notice on the front pages, and after his December 18 announcement he refused to hold any press conferences. The Liberal campaign was, as Trudeau admitted, tightly controlled. Influenced by hockey fanatic Keith Davey’s belief that he should simply “rag the puck” while taking occasional but devastating shots at Clark, Trudeau appeared rarely in public and shunned the press wherever possible. Davey, Coutts, and campaign co-chair Marc Lalonde advised Trudeau to refuse to debate Clark and Ed Broadbent, the feisty NDP leader. As it happened, Trudeau gradually came to enjoy electioneering in this style. He abandoned the corduroy suit he had favoured for the 1979 campaign and joined Toronto advertising executive Jerry Grafstein on a trip to the stylish Harry Rosen store in Toronto, where he gathered together new garb that made him appear a senior level executive rather than a common-room philosopher.9
In St. John’s, for instance, the press corps sent him a bilingual petition requesting a news conference late in the campaign. When Gossage handed him the petition with twenty-nine signatures, Trudeau put on his reading glasses, scrutinized it, and scrawled on the document: “fiat medial conferenciam.” Gossage checked the Latin, scheduled the first press conference, and watched Trudeau deftly fend off all attempts to get information from him. Late in the campaign, he quoted the French poet Léon Bloy, which inspired radio journalist Jim Maclean to thank Trudeau for “raising the level” of the campaign. Maclean then challenged Trudeau to identify the source for a parody he proceeded to read over the public address system of Trudeau’s DC-9. He received no immediate answer, but the next day in Winnipeg, Trudeau himself did a parody of The Tempest and remarked: “That’s to get even with the press who suspected I didn’t even know some parody from The Merchant of Venice.” For the remainder of the campaign, journalists were treated to “Poetry Wars,” in which Trudeau did parodies of poems in his speeches, and Maclean, a poetry lover himself, tried to identify them. Looking back, press secretary Patrick Gossage recalls these moments as startling. To have a francophone prime minister identify, without error, numerous poems in English testified not only to Trudeau’s remarkable memory but to a romantic nature that the harsh political storms most often concealed. Near the end of the campaign, as the Liberal lead in the Gallup poll reached 20 percent, Trudeau inserted into his speech: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the Tory Party.” Maclean recognized the cleverly chosen source: “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats.10
As Trudeau’s own “second coming” neared, the confident Liberal campaign team scheduled a Saturday night party with members of the press, who had been so deftly rebuffed during the campaign. The mood was uproarious, Trudeau was engaged, and laughter filled the room at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. The Liberal leader ended the night with an impressive impromptu recitation of the extended poem “Les Conquérants de l’or,” by Cuban-French poet José-María Heredia, which describes the Spanish conquest of Peru. The journalists, with one exception, were stunned by Trudeau’s capacious memory. The exception was George Radwanski, a Toronto Star editor who had written the best-selling biography that assessed Trudeau as an “unfulfilled” prime minister. Throughout the dinner, the Liberal leader referred to him as “Peter,” even though Trudeau had spent more time with him than with any other journalist in recent times. Radwanski thought the error was intentional, an insult both to him and to Peter C. Newman, who had declared that the Liberals could never win again with Trudeau.11
Trudeau enjoyed taunting and teasing the press during the campaign, especially as it became clear in early February that his hopes would be fulfilled. He later wrote that the “whole theme” of the campaign was straightforward: “If you’re the government, you’ve got to govern, and that means making decisions—and we can do it.” There was no leaders’ debate because, in 1979, in Trudeau’s contemptuous words, the debate “was being run by the journalists rather than by the participants in the election.” He resisted public appearances: they brought out the hecklers, and he realized that his quick temper might provoke him to say something stupid or, even worse, obscene. Yet the Liberal campaign had clearer policy direction than any of his previous campaigns, partly because the Clark Conservative c
ampaign, with its budget, decentralist, and mortgage interest deductibility proclamations, defined the major issues not just for themselves but also for the Liberals. Moreover, members of the Liberals’ national executive at its meeting on December 15 had insisted on a role for the party in writing the platform. Lorna Marsden, a sociologist at the University of Toronto, with substantial assistance from Trudeau’s aide and speechwriter Tom Axworthy, took the lead in creating a nationalist platform that stressed government intervention to maintain and expand Canadian industry while protecting the disadvantaged in society. MacEachen, whose political views had been formed both by the hard times of Cape Breton coalfields and by the Catholic social thinking of Moses Coady and his famed Antigonish movement, brought a passion for social and economic equality to the drafting table. Axworthy flew with Trudeau throughout the campaign and fed him “Gainesburgers”—meaty program chunks, like a well-known dog food, that entered Trudeau’s speeches in “short snappy lines.”
Gossage became convinced that “however much TV reporters talked over a Trudeau clip, however they served it up and carved it up, and however the pundits (many of whom had become entranced with Clark and his Cabinet) ranted, Trudeau’s words, and the carefully nuanced nationalist Liberal program, got out to the public.” Most important, Trudeau was comfortable with this platform. Clark’s assertion that Canada was a “community of communities,” for instance, soon overcame Trudeau’s own wariness of nationalism and gave a strong focus to his attacks on Clark and other “enemies” of “the spirit of Canada.” He bitterly opposed provincial autonomists such as Peter Lougheed in Alberta, who had resisted negotiations with Clark as much as he had previously with Trudeau, and he despised Brian Peckford, the new Conservative premier of Newfoundland, whose claims for offshore oil were garlanded with assertions of provincial rights and autonomy similar to those of Alberta. In the words of Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, “Axworthy had deliberately used his knowledge of Trudeau’s intellectual roots to find ways to persuade him that the proposed energy and industrial-strategy policies did not reflect the old negative nationalism but were portents of a new positive Canadianization.”12
On election night, February 18, Trudeau invited Keith and Dorothy Davey to Stornoway to watch the results with the boys. Davey recalled that “Trudeau seemed far more interested in the overall numbers than in the individual candidates. At five or ten minutes to the hour, when the political commentator would hold forth on tele vision, he would listen most intently. Years later Trudeau would no doubt be able to remind certain commentators of some outrageous comment made on election night 1980.” The early returns from Atlantic Canada were good, even from Newfoundland, where the Liberals’ stand on offshore resources ran counter to Peckford’s rhetoric. They took 5 of 7 seats there, and 19 of 32 overall in Atlantic Canada. Then came the decisive moments as polls closed in Quebec and Ontario. In his native province, Trudeau won the greatest victory of any prime minister in Canadian history—an astonishing 74 of 75 seats, with 68.2 percent of the votes.* With the referendum looming, those results stood as a stark warning to separatists that they were facing a serious battle. In Ontario the Liberals took 52 of 95 seats, regaining urban fortresses that had fallen to the Tories in 1979. Trudeau already had his majority, but it swelled little as the results came in from the West, where the Liberals won only 2 of the 90 seats beyond the Ontario border. The Liberals had conquered—but they had also divided.13
Joe Clark graciously conceded the election in Spruce Grove, Alberta, where he paid tribute to the democratic process and, amid chants of “No, no,” wished Trudeau and the Liberals well. After Clark spoke, Trudeau worked his way through the exultant Liberal throng gathered at Ottawa’s Château Laurier. Wearing a dark suit, a thin crimson tie, but, surprisingly, no rose, Trudeau revelled in the moment as he kissed many women and greeted old friends. As the crowd burst forth in what the CBC announcer called the “shrill sound of victory,” Trudeau cast his glance about the crowd and began, memorably: “Welcome to the eighties.” The decade would be “full of problems and opportunities” for Canada, but the country would now be able to confront the difficulties and seize the opportunities because the 1980 election showed decisively that “Canada is more than the sum of its parts.” Trudeau was surprisingly serious and far more aggressive and energetic than on the day when he announced his return to politics. “It was exciting,” he later wrote. “Like Seneca, who wrote, ‘Live every day as though it is your last,’ I was resolved that I would govern in this next term as though it was going to be my last.” He did—and as things turned out, it would be his final and his most significant government.14
After the May election the previous year, when the Liberals left the prime-ministerial “bunker,” the Langevin Block opposite Parliament Hill, they scrawled in lipstick on the washroom mirrors: “We’ll be back.” In that spirit, they quickly moved to reoccupy the premises after the election. There was no time for delay, with the Quebec referendum looming and the Parti Québécois’s intensified preparations for the vote in the spring of 1979. Then, on November 1, the government of Quebec released its lengthy platform for the referendum, entitled Québec-Canada: A New Deal. Following the carefully crafted strategy of Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Claude Morin, the document argued the case for “sovereignty-association” with Canada. The concept was admittedly vague, but early polls taken during the Clark government indicated that Quebec voters tended to approve of it. These results, of course, were not lost on Trudeau and his closest colleagues, who despaired because, in their view, Clark seemed indifferent to the gathering forces of separatism. Quebec Liberal leader Claude Ryan was organizing the “no” side in the referendum, and Clark’s overwhelmingly anglophone government had not been well equipped in knowledge or in skills to participate in those organizational activities. Besides, Ryan neither wanted nor needed him.15
Trudeau presented Ryan with a more difficult choice. When Trudeau resigned, Ryan’s tribute had been generous, despite their bitter differences in the seventies. But during the election campaign in May 1979, they had disagreed publicly when Trudeau said that, if re-elected, he would hold a national referendum to patriate the Constitution—a course Ryan strongly opposed. When Trudeau won his overwhelming victory in Quebec in February 1980, Ryan’s leadership of the “no” side in the Quebec referendum debate was obviously affected. Unlike Clark, Trudeau was a francophone with strong views on the nature of constitutional reform. Ryan had responded to Lévesque’s promise of a referendum by creating a commission to bring forward a report not simply on Quebec’s constitutional position but also on the broader question of Canadian constitutional reform. The result of this process, the livre beige, the name the press gave to the document Ryan issued for the referendum, “owed obvious intellectual debts to the Pépin-Robarts [sic] report published twelve months before,” according to legal scholar Edward McWhinney. “A number of the Pépin-Robarts [sic] research staff spilled over into … [Ryan’s] Liberal commission, and the wider ranks of research staff spilled over into the Liberal commission and the wider ranks of its specialist consultants.” Trudeau, as we know, had purportedly thrown the Pepin-Robarts report into his waste basket soon after it landed on his desk, and the livre beige may well have encountered the same fate.
But perhaps not. Trudeau’s long political tenure had taught him the value of ambiguity, particularly when the question announced by Lévesque in December was, for federalists, maddeningly ambiguous.* Carefully crafted to reflect Quebecers’ opposition to “separation,” it responded to polls that indicated they would support “equality.” The ambiguity lured “tired federalists,” such as Léon Dion, the eminent Laval academic and father of future Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. He declared that Trudeau’s federalism was too rigid and Ryan’s too complex. While refusing “separatism,” Dion indicated that he was compelled to vote oui. Trudeau’s own speechwriter for the referendum campaign, André Burelle, later claimed that he was deceived into thinking that Trude
au would accept more radical change: “I did lend my pen to Mr. Trudeau during the May 1980 referendum to sell to Quebecers a Canada of ‘several smaller nations under one,’ in the vision of [Emmanuel] Mounier [the French personalist who became Trudeau’s mentor]. However, after appearing to buy my ideas (which many other federalists shared) to cajole Quebec, Mr. Trudeau discarded them immediately after the referendum battle.” Burelle’s complaints have some merit. Just as Lévesque employed an unclear question to broaden his support, so Trudeau cloaked his views in ambiguity and, for a while, set aside old feuds. For Trudeau, it was the battle of his lifetime against a brilliant foe. He could not afford to lose supporters because of a wayward phrase or a careless comment.16
When the new Trudeau government took office, the referendum campaign was well advanced, but Trudeau moved quickly to enhance the federal presence and create a stronger national government. First he attempted to strengthen his majority in its weakest area: western Canada. Shortly after the election, he called NDP leader Ed Broadbent and asked whether he would join the government. The NDP had won 22 seats in western Canada, while the Liberals held only 2, both in Manitoba. Despite winning 32 seats, their highest total ever, the New Democrats had been gloomy on election night. There had been no breakthrough in Ontario, Broadbent’s own province, and Trudeau had won by staking out the nationalist and leftist turf that the NDP regarded as its own. NDP finance critic Bob Rae later recalled that, when Broadbent appeared at the first post-election caucus meeting, he expressed frustration at how the Liberals and Trudeau had undercut the NDP, robbing the party of its hopes of power. Not surprisingly, then, Trudeau’s offer astonished Broadbent, particularly when the prime minister responded to Broadbent’s joking comment, “Let’s see, I’ll take five or six Cabinet portfolios,” with quick agreement: “You’ve got them.”