Just Watch Me

by John English

  In September 1982, with criticism mounting and the economy collapsing, Trudeau moved MacEachen from Finance to External Affairs and appointed Marc Lalonde in his place. Although the press reaction was mixed, everyone respected Lalonde’s strength and influence on the government process. The classical pianist, political progressive, and frequent Trudeau date Monica Gaylord welcomed Lalonde’s appointment in a letter to Trudeau: “I heard of your Cabinet shuffle today & with a toughy like Lalonde in Finance, I know our economic recovery is inevitable. I really like him. Would you consider making me your Minister of Meditation and Peace?” Like many Trudeau supporters, she wanted a balance. That balance was reflected in Lalonde’s first budget on April 19, 1983: he offered some stimulus and a few tax incentives that pleased the business community, but he refused to join the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. In the words of Timothy Lewis, the author of the major academic study of “deficit fighting” in Canada, Lalonde was “perhaps Canada’s most Keynesian finance minister.” With Trudeau’s open support, he indicated that he would “not tighten the screws on the economy, cut billions from government spending, or seek to eliminate inflation by brute force.” In short, he confirmed that the government would continue “to ensure that the strong and affluent helped the weak and vulnerable.”45

  Trudeau reinforced the message in a national address on June 28, which echoed the defence of equity in Lalonde’s budget and the rejection of Reaganomics. He pointed to improvements in the Canadian economy, where sixty-three thousand new jobs had been created in May, most of them for younger Canadians, and claimed that his 6/5 program had cut the rate of inflation in half. Although he thanked the business community for its cooperation on the wage and price policy, his words echoed Stockholm and Paris more than Washington and London, social democracy rather than Reagan and Thatcher:

  But there are those who would lead us from this crossroads back to conflict, back to discord, back to fragmentation as a nation. Such leaders are the few who think that now is their chance to grab a bigger share….

  The Canadian government is not prepared to let a few impose a return to conflict and inflation on the vast majority of Canadians….

  We will seek ways in which the combined weight of federal and provincial spending can be used to prevent a few cases of unjustified price increases, and excessive executive salary increases and wage settlements, from becoming a pattern for our future.

  The government is particularly concerned that the money set aside in the budget for Special Recovery Capital Projects to create jobs not be used simply to pay higher salaries for executives, or higher wages for fewer workers. We will examine these projects in light of these settlements.

  We will not spend public money to allow any group of Canadians to take a bigger share at the expense of other Canadians, not when a million and a half people are still without work.

  Trudeau concluded with a call for the nation to work together as it went forward. But it would be a different direction from the one taken by the Republican administration south of the border.46

  At the time that Trudeau made this speech, the Conservatives stood at 50 percent in the Gallup poll and were in the process of replacing Joe Clark with Brian Mulroney. Clark had refused to accept 66.9 percent as adequate support in a leadership review vote in January and had called for a leadership convention. Most expected either William Davis or Peter Lougheed to step up, but both declined, and Clark seemed on the way to a victory. Then Brian Mulroney’s well-oiled machine overcame Clark’s early lead. Mulroney, who had never sat in Parliament and had lost to Clark in the leadership convention in 1976, was fluently bilingual and, as a leading Canadian businessman, appealed to those conservatives who found Clark weak and too liberal for these conservative times.* In August 1983 Mulroney won a by-election in Nova Scotia, and in September the Tories stood at an astonishing 62 percent in the Gallup poll. Whispers about Trudeau’s resignation became murmurs and then, in the late fall, loud declarations from Liberal riding presidents, Turner loyalists, and even some Liberal parliamentarians.

  In the Commons and in the constituencies, Trudeau and other Liberals accused the Tories of shifting to the right and embarking on the neo-conservative path. Mulroney, however, refused to be specific, while reassuring Conservatives during the leadership race that “all of the candidates have good policies but all of these policies aren’t worth the powder to blow them across the street if we don’t get elected.” Not surprisingly, the Liberals sought to force Mulroney out of his political hiding places, but he was elusive, and in some cases his policy stances were congenial. Like Trudeau, but unlike Stanfield and Clark, he openly opposed “special status” for Quebec and spoke publicly against opting out with financial compensation.47 These stances were popular with English Canadians, but the Liberals thought they had the winning issue with medicare—Canada’s most popular social program.

  Since the 1970s spending on medical care, the costs of which were shared between federal and provincial governments, had soared. In 1977 the federal government had freed the provinces from the obligation to spend transfer funds specifically on health care, and the result seems to have been an increase not only in health costs (from 5.2 percent of Gross National Expenditure in 1977 to 6.1 percent in 1982) but also in extra billing by doctors. Mr. Justice Emmett Hall, a well-known Conservative, had condemned such charges in a report in 1981. The issue seemed perfect: the provinces where extra billing was an issue were the Conservative Alberta and Ontario. The practice was unpopular with citizens but much praised by Conservative think tanks such as the Fraser Institute and by conservative medical associations. Health Minister Monique Bégin was popular, articulate in both languages, and ready to fight the conservative establishments. On July 25, 1983, just after Clark’s defeat but before Mulroney’s entry into the House of Commons, Bégin announced that she would introduce a Canada Health Act that would prevent extra billing. The plan was to withhold one dollar from the provinces for each dollar of user fee or extra billing. The New Democrats immediately backed the proposed bill; medical associations and several provinces denounced it; and Mulroney’s Conservatives hesitated.48

  With the National Energy Program in tatters, the strengthening of FIRA a casualty of the recession, and debt costs soaring, the Liberal government took refuge in the popular social programs their party had established in the sixties. In response to the recommendations of the women’s movement, it strengthened the child tax credit and promised improved funding for child-oriented policies. Tom Axworthy, Trudeau’s principal secretary, emerged from the Prime Minister’s Office and publicly presented the case for progressive policies—and, of course, for the continuing presence of Pierre Trudeau. His eloquent arguments, backed by polls that indicated Canadians’ continued support for those policies, rallied the Liberal legions that had fought the hard battles for Trudeau. Bégin’s proposed Canada Health bill got immediate endorsement from major seniors’ groups, and polls indicated overwhelming support for the bill and opposition to the extra billing. But Liberal ranks were thinner than in 1980, and many were exhausted. Then, in December, when the Canada Health bill finally came forward, Mulroney rallied the Conservatives to support it unanimously. It was a deft blow that deflated the Trudeau Liberals’ hopes for a fight—and a resurgence of progressive passion.49

  Within the Cabinet, some ministers mused about contesting the leadership while others glanced toward Toronto, to detect signs that John Turner, a favourite of the business community, might come forward to revive the Liberal Party’s flagging fortunes. Although Trudeau’s defence of equity, medicare, and social programs remained popular with most Canadians, many younger Liberals complained that he was out of step with the times, a throwback to the sixties when all things seemed possible, budgets were in surplus, and unemployment was a distant memory.50 They were correct: Trudeau’s last years in office represented strong dissent from the conservative forces unleashed internationally by Reagan and Thatcher. Spurred on by close friends such as Kidder, Gayl
ord, Garnett, Pelletier, Marchand, and Hébert, a troubled Trudeau turned outwards and decided to challenge the superpowers. In the words of his sixties visitors John Lennon and Yoko Ono, it was finally time to give peace a chance.

  * In his memoirs, Mr. Blakeney points out his support for recognition of Aboriginal rights in the constitutional meetings but also indicates that Aboriginal leaders did not necessarily support the clause he had advanced in Ottawa. He thinks Premier Lougheed’s addition of the word “existing” to the final accord was correct in that it did not recognize historical rights. In the case of women and Aboriginals, Blakeney blames the CBC for misreporting his comments. He is a target of both the federal and the Quebec politicians in their memoirs, who accuse him of legalism and ambiguity. Allan Blakeney, An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), chaps. 17 & 18.

  * Lévesque’s identification with Lougheed is strongly expressed in his memoirs: “This Albertan, by far the most remarkable man on the Prairies in his time, is so passionately concerned about sovereignty in his own way that, even though opposing us, he can understand our position.” Trudeau’s response to Alberta’s initiatives reflected his understanding of this implicit alliance of opposites. René Lévesque, Memoirs, trans. Philip Stratford (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 42.

  * Lévesque’s rage against the “English” was not reflected in his policy of sovereignty-association, which strongly implies close association with Canada’s other official linguistic group. Graham Fraser, who knew Quebec well as a journalist during the seventies and eighties, later said: “Even though very few members of the Parti Québécois really shared his passion for this formula of sovereignty-association, he managed to keep their loyalty. And he kept their loyalty because nobody in the Parti Québécois really believed he was as fervently attached to this formula as he turned out to be.” His “rage” in November thus excited the militants to believe—wrongly—that he might go beyond his stated political position. Fraser, quoted in Robert Bothwell, Canada and Quebec: One Country, Two Histories, rev. ed. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998), 157. Fraser’s own book, René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power, 2nd ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2003), gives a fine, detailed account of Lévesque’s relationship with his province and his party.

  * As a practising Catholic, Trudeau would not divorce. He told Margaret, according to her account, “You are my wife, you will always be my wife, and errant as you may be, nothing will ever change that.” Under Canadian law at that point, a divorce after three years was possible if both parties agreed, but Trudeau would not. Without such agreement, five years “separate and apart” were required, and Margaret later learned that her days in the attic at 24 Sussex did not count as “separation.” In 1984 Margaret filed for divorce and soon married Ottawa businessperson Fried Kemper, with whom she had two children. Trudeau did discuss the possibility of remarriage with his children, but he never indicated that he gave it serious consideration. Quotation from Margaret Trudeau, Consequences (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 77. Interview with Alexandre Trudeau, June 2009.

  * Papandreou, the charismatic leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, had become prime minister on October 21, 1981, after an election in which he attacked Greece’s membership in NATO, called for dramatic restructuring of Greek democracy, and denounced the presence of American military bases in Greece. After a coup by the Greek military in 1967, Papandreou had been briefly incarcerated but then freed when the U.S. government exerted pressure on the generals. Papandreou, “a world-class academic economist” with a Harvard doctorate, had taught at York University in Toronto from 1969 to 1974. During that time he rallied Greek exile forces and played a major role in the Canadian Greek community, which strongly supported the Trudeau Liberals. On Papandreou’s academic reputation and career, see Richard Clogg, “From Academy to Acropolis,” Times Higher Education Supplement, Dec. 22, 1995, 16.

  * MacEachen’s timing was bad. J.H. Perry, the leading historian of Canadian fiscal policy, wrote amusingly about the “taxpayer onslaught” in the 1981 budget: “Seldom has the aplomb of taxpayers, by now inured with the conviction of the age that taxes were an evil to be avoided at all cost, been more outraged.” He concluded that future governments should avoid appointing economists like MacEachen or accountants like Edgar Benson to the post of finance minister and should favour lawyers, who tend to be “much more reasonable chaps” when taking on taxpayers. The real problem, Perry rightly points out, was that “this sort of shock should be spared a country on the eve of a serious recession.” Of course, when MacEachen introduced his budget in 1981, he was unaware of the ferocious economic downturn Canada was facing. J.H. Perry, A Fiscal History of Canada: The Postwar Years (Toronto: Canadian Tax Foundation, 1989), 91–92.

  * Trudeau’s uncertainties were mirrored among economists more generally. The eminent Canadian economist Richard Lipsey, who served as president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1981, reflected the general confusion among economists in the early 1980s in his presidential address, in which he questioned whether the claims of monetarists were justified.

  * The divisions or, rather, the duality of approach remained within the Trudeau government. The energetic Pepin, an economic liberal, tried to end the historic Crow’s Nest Pass grain rates, which had been established in 1897, through an agreement with the Canadian Pacific Railway, as a subsidy both for eastbound grain and agricultural products and for westbound settlers’ goods. Pepin proposed in the Western Grains Transportation Bill (1983) that the Crow rate be replaced by a rising price for grain shipments in return for an infusion into the railways, which were underservicing the grain trade because of the low rates. After angry debate, the bill passed in the fall. The Conservative government of Saskatchewan opposed this attempt to move to market prices, and the federal government and Trudeau made neo-liberal arguments against subsidies. R.B. Byers, ed., Canadian Annual Review of Politics and Public Affairs 1983 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 83–85.

  * Mulroney’s own political views were secondary to the opposition to Clark. A firm supporter of bilingualism and, unlike Joe Clark, a proponent of the charter and patriation after Trudeau’s announcement of his constitutional initiative, Mulroney had strong Liberal ties. In the 1980s he became the president of Iron Ore Company of Canada, principally because of the support of William Bennett, the former assistant to the legendary Liberal C.D. Howe. Bennett’s daughter Kristin had dated Trudeau and, in the 1980s, married Liberal MP Doug Frith. Jim Coutts had approached Mulroney about joining the Trudeau government in 1976, an offer he declined. Mulroney claimed that conservative Conservatives were attracted to him because, as he told Peter C. Newman, “I make a point of including people. Clark always excluded all people like Dan McKenzie [a right-wing MP from Manitoba]—he let the press paint them all as crazy right wingers. You disagree with Clark, you get excluded.” He told caucus after he was elected: “Do you want to form a government or spend the rest of your time writing letters to the editor?” It was the right question. Mulroney was the most successful Conservative leader since Macdonald. Interview with Jim Coutts, Feb. 2008; confidential interviews; Peter C. Newman, The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister (Toronto: Random House, 2005), 63–64. On the offer from Coutts, see Brian Mulroney, Memoirs 1939–1993 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007), 187. Mulroney says that Trudeau told him after he lost the 1976 Conservative leadership contest: “Your election would not have been a pleasure for me” (173).

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PEACE AT LAST

  The Cold War was middle-aged when Pierre Trudeau became prime minister. The fears and ferocious enthusiasms of its early years had largely passed, and Trudeau well suited the new spirit, where people worried less about external threats than their immediate surroundings. The challenge of Quebec separation, the provision of social security, and the assurance of econ
omic and political stability emerged as the dominant themes of the later sixties, and Trudeau consistently emphasized that these issues would take precedence in his new government. His attitude reflected a general mood. The halcyon days had ended, when Canada could play its best game on the narrow international playing field on which its youthful exuberance and diplomatic skills had shone among older, rougher, but mostly congenial colleagues in their common battle against menacing and awkward foes.

  Even Lester Pearson, Canada’s greatest player, had developed strong doubts in the sixties about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), of which he had been a founder, and the United Nations, in whose corridors he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The presidency of Lyndon Johnson and the expanding Vietnam War shattered his confidence in American leadership of the West, the foundation on which Canadian diplomacy had rested. Robert Bothwell, the leading historian of Canadian foreign policy, notes that this “sense of an unsatisfactory present” meant that “it was time for a change, to find someone or something that would cross the political and social crevasse that had opened up under Canada’s national institutions.” This sense caused Pearson to look to Trudeau as his successor, the contender who promised a sharp turn away from those institutions that Canada and Pearson himself had helped to build.1

  When Pearson told Paul Martin, his external affairs minister, that his time to lead the Liberal Party had passed, the bell tolled for Canada’s activist internationalism focused on the United Nations, close alliance with the United States, military commitment to the defence of Europe, and a key role in building the Commonwealth from the ashes of the British Empire. Trudeau had always stood outside the mainstream of Canadian foreign policy. He had opposed the Second World War and, later, the American-led United Nations intervention in Korea, and he had attacked Canada’s alliance politics and Pearson’s acceptance of nuclear weapons for Canadian forces in 1963. By the time he came to power, however, the standards had become muddied, and clear direction was no longer apparent. For Trudeau, the neutralism of his fellow “wise men” Gérard Pelletier and Jean Marchand, or of his valuable Toronto supporters Walter Gordon and Donald Macdonald, was not an option. The forces of Liberal tradition remained too strong. Knowing that he could represent a search for new direction while forswearing a clear break with the past, Trudeau found agreement with Pearson on a central proposition: the crisis of national unity must take precedence. It was time to search within, not to project to the world a confident face that concealed a confused soul.2