by John English
It was a frenzied year for Trudeau: constitutional battles captured the front pages of most newspapers, the National Energy Program dominated the business pages, and the recession’s rapid progress meant that human interest stories, almost always sad, were featured on the evening news. Trudeau missed few steps in the path toward Cancún, even though the constitutional drama and the economic crisis were periodic and unpredictable diversions. He travelled frequently and, his detractors claimed, frantically and expensively. The year began badly, when a planned trip to Austria both to visit Chancellor Kreisky and to enjoy a ski holiday had to be cancelled after a snowstorm stranded him in the resort town of Lech. When he finally emerged, he skipped a visit to Algeria and flew directly to Nigeria and Senegal, where he doled out generous aid and announced his commitment to international economic justice. He later visited many other African countries, where he opposed apartheid, committed Canada to increased aid—0.7 percent of GDP by 1990—and supported a “new international economic order,” although he always accompanied his enthusiasm with a caution about the dangers of rapid change.19
With his Western partners, however, Trudeau was deliberate and forceful: he insisted that a full half-day would be devoted to North-South issues at the meetings at Château Montebello. By mid-June Trudeau had visited over twenty capitals to prepare for the G7 summit and the North-South discussions. In Ottawa, even international development critic Bernard Wood praised Trudeau’s efforts as Canadian “interest in North-South relations reached a high water mark in this country in mid-1981, and the world community looked to Canada as never before.”20 A special parliamentary task force report had called for a new level of Canadian commitment and, unusually, the government responded to the report by permitting a two-day House of Commons debate on development in mid-June as a prelude to the G7 summit. In the debate Trudeau clearly set out his understanding of the problem: “The South is not a myth; it is a group of countries, most of them former colonies, held together by a shared perception of their status in relation to the rest of the world. In their view,” he said, “solidarity among themselves is the way to exert countervailing power against the weight of the industrial North. Their vision of a new international economic order proceeds from their common view that the old rules have not permitted equal opportunity or an equitable sharing of the fruits of effort. They are right [that] justice is on their side.”21 Still, the interaction between North and South could be a win-win situation: Trudeau acknowledged that the North benefited from the new markets in the South, and that the new international economic order could contribute to international peace and security.
Despite this nod to the North’s self-interest, Trudeau’s views were anathema to Thatcher and probably to Reagan too, although the president was temporarily waylaid by an unsuccessful assassination attempt on March 30. The new American administration made it clear that rather than engaging in a vague discussion of aid levels and needs, it wanted to focus on the corruption and economic weaknesses of developing countries themselves. However, as an American official said later: “Canada said no; Pierre Trudeau would not sponsor a summit that would address the domestic policies of developing countries in any significant ways. These policies,” he stated, “were not our business.”22 Better known and more intellectually congenial was German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who on Trudeau’s personal invitation spent the pre-conference weekend of July 18–19 secluded with him at Harrington Lake. In Schmidt’s recollection, “the reflective and outwardly almost always cheerful Canadian prime minister was a clever host; he had called the meeting in a large log cabin–style hotel in an almost untouched landscape. None of us could help but feel well here—most especially Reagan.” Trudeau had indeed chosen Montebello because he wanted to keep the meetings informal and to encourage direct interaction among the leaders, even though its distance from the capital meant that he had to return by helicopter each night for a press briefing while the other leaders frolicked and hiked. With its river views and rustic style, Montebello echoed a romantic past where the folksy U.S. president felt supremely comfortable.*
In Ottawa, some two thousand reporters were crammed into hotels, and the social whirl was intense as minor celebrities passed in and out. By Sunday, when most of the leaders arrived, the city was an “armed camp,” and Schmidt and Trudeau drove down the river to Montebello together from Harrington Lake. They knew the balance had shifted from the progressive and reformist mood of summits during the seventies. En route to the conference, Thatcher visited Washington, where she and Reagan swore fealty to their common conservative faith on the White House lawn. Mitterrand, the “consummate opportunist,” was the wild card at the summit. Many of the leaders had not met him before, and Thatcher even mistook him for a doorman when she arrived at Montebello. His socialist domestic policies, which included nationalization of the banks and reduction of the work week, gave some evidence of his views, but his stand on international matters was still a mystery. In his recent writings he had spoken, as Trudeau had in the fifties, about moral equivalency between the Soviet bloc and the West, but during the brief period since his election in May, he had begun to express concern about the Soviet armaments and their new nuclear rockets pointed at Western Europe. The ingredients were present for a lively and interesting summit.23
As it turned out, it was an interesting but unsuccessful summit: when Sir Nicholas Bayne, a distinguished British diplomat, and Robert Putnam, an eminent Harvard academic, ranked the G7 summits, they gave it a “C.” Of the previous summits, only Puerto Rico, Trudeau’s first summit, held in 1976, received a lower grade (D). Trudeau’s hopes for informal, thoughtful discussion leading to serious commitments on North-South issues and the major trade issues quickly dissolved. Things started off badly when Reagan expressed shock on his arrival that most of the staff spoke a foreign language to each other. Then, at the first meeting, he stunned the others when he pulled out note cards for the discussion and read from them. Frustrated, Trudeau insisted on informality, and Reagan switched to telling his favourite stories—during which the Japanese prime minister Zenko Suzuki dozed off and Trudeau played studiously with his rose. When East-West issues came up, for instance, Reagan, in Trudeau’s recollection, “launched into one of his anecdotes about his time as president of Actors Equity in Hollywood in the 1940s.” He claimed that the KGB sent a priest to “spread discord among the actors in the union.” In a private conversation about the Middle East that had occurred when Reagan visited Ottawa in March, Reagan had mused that religion was the answer. Puzzled, Trudeau tried to draw him out. Reagan explained that religion was the key to driving out communist influence from the Middle East because everyone there was religious—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—but the communists were atheists. Everyone else therefore had a common interest in fighting the communists. As Reagan spun out his tale, Trudeau humoured him, slyly eyeing Reagan’s embarrassed assistants as he focused his full attention on the president. Reagan’s anecdotes amused and troubled Trudeau simultaneously.24
Trudeau, however, was less troubled by Reagan than by Mitterrand, who at the Sunday night dinner “made everyone at the table realize that a formidable, and staunchly anti-Communistic, statesman was in charge of the world’s third nuclear power.” Although Schmidt was cautious about the hard line toward the Soviets taken around the table, he too welcomed evidence that Mitterrand’s statements about the Soviets and the Americans being morally equivalent were abandoned. Moreover, Schmidt had met with Reagan before the G7, and while disturbed by his ignorance of issues, found him much preferable to Carter, whom he saw as unpredictable and emotional. As Schmidt left Reagan on May 22, he concluded: “After four years of insecurity I was once again dealing with a consistent and therefore reliable American president.” Trudeau, who liked Carter, yearned for the earlier days of détente, distrusted Reagan’s “obsession with communism” and the free market, and wanted the summit to focus on North-South issues, found himself increasingly isolated as the summit began.25
On the Tuesday afternoon, Trudeau and his colleagues returned to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where he presented a positive spin on the conference in his official host’s statement. He acknowledged that before the summit, the presence of four new summit participants and the differences among the nations made many commentators predict it would be a “very difficult summit.” Trudeau declared that the prediction was wrong: the summit had created confidence and produced agreements. On trade there was an agreement for more structure and the need for a new trade agenda; on economic policy, particularly the high interest rates in the United States, the leaders agreed that the fight against inflation could not be accomplished solely through monetary policy; on the East-West divide, the current situation with “the Soviet military build-up and Soviet actions in the Third World” required increased “defence capability,” although Trudeau emphasized the continuing importance of “dialogue and negotiation.” Finally, Trudeau said that the Cancún process, with its emphasis on “global negotiations” to improve the lot of the developing countries, received support: this “openness to the process of global negotiations represents a consensus which did not exist before our Summit and seemed very remote not too many months ago.”28
Trudeau was right. The Carter administration had refused to consider a Cancún meeting unless a precise agenda with specific goals was prepared. The Reagan administration, however, believed that the meeting could be a useful forum where the demand for “global negotiations” might be defused rather than advanced. In public speeches Reagan and other officials diminished expectations for the conference, while in private meetings they strongly asserted their positions. In a meeting with Ambassador Andrés Rozental, the Mexican official responsible for summit planning, and other officials from Mexico and Austria, Richard Allen, the assistant to the president for national security affairs, said that Cancún could be an occasion for dialogue but not for the beginning of “global negotiations”—a term he claimed the United States did not understand. Rozental assured him that there would be no link between “global negotiations and Cancún,” but Allen retorted that Trudeau had said that “global negotiations must replace the dialogue since the latter means nothing more than talk, talk, talk.” The discussion ended with Allen suggesting that “Latins have a greater appreciation for imprecision than we do in the US.”29
As the planning for Cancún continued, Trudeau emerged as a probable replacement for the conference co-chair, Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky, whose health problems made his participation doubtful. Trudeau intensified his focus on the process, and in late July and early August, when he visited Africa for a U.N. Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy, he rallied “South” support for the meeting. He reported to the conference that the “summit participants in Ottawa demonstrated a readiness to respond more effectively to the needs of Third World countries.” The current economic crisis, he averred, should not drive poor and rich nations apart but should bring them together to satisfy their mutual “craving for national and international stability.”30 But that craving had already created different tastes.
Alexander Haig, Reagan’s secretary of state, advised the president to take advantage of the occasion to establish strong bilateral relationships with other leaders, to reassure the twenty-two countries in attendance that the United States continued to be “sensitive to the concerns” of developing countries, and to promote free market solutions to global problems. Although Mitterrand had impressed the Americans with his unexpectedly stern anti-communism in Ottawa, he was equally strong in his demand for “global negotiations” and a World Bank energy facility, which the United States opposed. Cancún, then, offered an opportunity to derail such a plan through a bilateral deal with Mitterrand. Bilaterals, Haig advised Reagan, could be used to promote the American proposal for later subministerial meetings. The proposal was completely insincere: “Publicly,” Haig added, “we should say we desire this so the momentum of Cancún is not lost. Privately we see it as a check on the dialogue.” In truth, Reagan agreed to attend for only one reason: Thatcher had persuaded him to go “because she thought it important that they should be there to argue the free-market case” and to block plans to put the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank under United Nations control.
Trudeau met Thatcher just before the Cancún conference, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the first week of October in Melbourne, Australia. There he began his remarks by indicating that “Mrs. Thatcher had said, almost wistfully, that the world had not achieved greater stability even though the number of nations in the UN had increased from 50 to more than 150 in the post-war years.” The remark probably did not amuse Thatcher, but Trudeau redeemed himself by reminding the non-aligned Commonwealth leaders that Canada was aligned with the West, and that non-aligned countries “should use their influence to make sure that they were even-handed in their arguments.” She was surely not so pleased when he declared publicly that 1981 was a historic year in which the world must decide either to fight global inequalities or to miss a great opportunity. With winter descending on the North, twenty-two world leaders then arrived on Cancún’s warm sands on October 21, 1981, to face history’s judgment.31
Trudeau had a remarkable ability to create mental compartments that he crammed with the detail required for the moment—a facility he used to the full when it became clear that Kreisky’s illness would prevent him from acting as co-chair and that Trudeau would have to take over. Even though the historic meeting in Ottawa on patriating the Constitution was only two weeks away, he was superbly prepared for the Cancún sessions. Fluently moving from French to English and then, unexpectedly, to Spanish, Trudeau stood out among leaders not simply because of his commitment, preparation, and linguistic ability but also because of his casual elegance in white suits, silk shirts, and informal clothes that emphasized his lean, well-muscled body among quite a few flabby ones. In the group photograph, which he reproduced in his memoirs, he wears sandals and a stylish, partially unbuttoned shirt as he smiles directly into the camera. Most of the other leaders are wearing suits, with Thatcher in a dark business ensemble with pearls. Reagan sports no jacket and black leather shoes, but he stares curiously away from the camera. Trudeau’s experience as chair of many meetings and his strong relationships with some of the participants, particularly several from Africa, helped him to steer the debate. Reagan was, as promised, jolly and cooperative. Thatcher cleverly blocked attempts to create new commitments and, at the final press conference, declared the conference a “success.” For her it was successful because, as she wrote later in her memoirs, it had ensured that the �
�intractable problems of Third World poverty, hunger and debt would not be solved by misdirected international intervention, but rather by liberating enterprise, promoting trade—and defeating socialism in all its forms.”32
Trudeau and Head were bitter in their disappointment: “The profound ignorance of Reagan about circumstances in the developing countries, and his naïve belief in the ability of free-market mechanisms to solve all problems everywhere, was a depressant.” Still, there was a chance of compromise and even success, but the Austrians, seeking an impossible perfection, encouraged several developing nations to scuttle it. The result, Trudeau and Head wrote, was that “a golden opportunity for real North-South progress was lost, cascading the relationship into the depths of Northern indifference for years thereafter.”33 The “historic” opportunity was missed, Trudeau’s chance to make a clear mark on the North-South divide disappeared, and Canada and its prime minister turned to other issues and interests.
Trudeau’s failure at Cancún was followed less than two weeks later by his triumph at the conference of November 5, 1981, when he persuaded all the premiers except René Lévesque to support both the patriation of the Constitution and a charter of rights and freedoms. He had only a brief moment for celebration, however, as the economic crisis caused by high interest rates and unemployment, and a political crisis caused by angry American attacks on Canada’s energy and foreign investment policies, required immediate attention. So angry were the Americans that fall that high-level officials considered expelling the Canadians from the exclusive club of the G7. Their presence there, after all, was the result of American pressure on the Europeans in happier times. The interventionist policies of the Liberal government offended Reagan’s economic conservatives, and its energy policies, particularly the provision for government “backing in” on previously established American claims, seemed punitive to other Americans who were ordinarily sympathetic to Canadian interests. Partly in response to these problems, in 1981 Trudeau sent Allan Gotlieb, who had been an adviser to him since his days as justice minister, as the Canadian ambassador to Washington. His major purpose was to soothe American anger.* In departing, Gotlieb warned Trudeau that there were some within the Privy Council who were anti-American: “Every time you express exasperation with the Americans or utter some criticism, these scribes immediately telephone around town, intimidating people, telling them that Trudeau was in a terrible snit about the Yanks and so we officials better be as tough as nails in dealing with them.” Yet Gotlieb, in reflecting on his final conversation with the prime minister before he departed, said that “Trudeau believes the Soviets can do no wrong” and that the “United States seems alien to him.”34