Just Watch Me

by John English

  His return and his silence were not an exile like de Gaulle’s at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, though there were some similarities in that the times no longer seemed a fit for his large ambitions. The Liberals under Turner were in disarray, while the Mulroney Conservatives were also stumbling badly. Neither side attacked his legacy directly, although the business press increasingly blamed Trudeau for the government’s deficit, which continued to rise. Women remained a large part of his life, and he craved their company, especially when they were young.* On November 1, 1985, he met twenty-three-year-old Brooke Johnson, an aspiring actor, at a fundraiser for the National Theatre School, and he first asked her to dance and then invited her to go with him for a walk in the country. Johnson later created a record of their platonic but close friendship in the play Trudeau Stories, which gently exposes his thoughts, strengths, and weaknesses. He told her that he no longer read very much, a fact his family verifies. As he always did with women, he wondered what she thought and what the future held. Through Tom Axworthy and Helmut Schmidt, Trudeau had become involved in InterAction, a new organization of former leaders committed to progressive international policies. In her play Johnson asks what the group did. Trudeau replies:

  “Oh, we talk about current issues in the world, a variety of things, and try to come up with solutions….”

  “That’s kind of comforting, that you get together that way, to talk, I mean outside the pressure of the political … hullabaloo….”

  “Well, it’s interesting. I hope we accomplish some things.”

  But he isn’t sure. Still, he adds, “It’s always nice to travel.”17

  InterAction did bring travel, which Trudeau certainly enjoyed. He told Johnson that he had been in every country except Albania. But belonging to this group also allowed him to reflect on the major topics of the day, along with other retired leaders and a few thinkers such as the eminent but unorthodox Catholic theologian Hans Küng, and his former aide Tom Axworthy. He chaired two “high-level experts” projects, far fewer than Helmut Schmidt and former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser, but the results were interesting. The first group studied “Ecology and Energy Options” and met in Montreal on April 29–30, 1989. Its report opens with startling prescience: “Global warming is with us. If present trends continue unchecked, rapid and continuous shifts in climate—including possible droughts in mid-continents and increases in frequency and intensity of tropical hurricanes—accompanied by increases in sea-level, will occur over the next decades.” These changes, the report continues, are “bound to endanger the well-being, perhaps the survival, of humanity.” His other report, the product of a London meeting on April 6–7, 1991, considered “economic transformation” in the former Warsaw Pact nations. Although supportive of the need to introduce trade liberalization and a market economy into Eastern Europe, Trudeau hesitated to recommend rapid change: “The failure of the socialist model should not be taken as a pretext to advance a ‘theological’ solution of pure capitalism as the only possible alternative,” he said. Rather, the report urged that “time sequencing is essential” and that, in making reforms, the former Warsaw Pact must “make haste slowly.”

  Trudeau’s concerns about making haste too quickly, with potentially disastrous results for the health of any society, were apparent in the mid-nineties, when Castro’s Cuba, reeling from the impact of the abrupt end of financial support from the Soviet Union, considered opening up its rigid state socialist system. Because of its historic economic ties with Cuba, Canada became involved in discussions with the Cuban government. James Bartleman, then the chief foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, later indicated that Castro abandoned his plan to loosen socialist restraints after a conversation with Trudeau, who cautioned him about its impact on the social health of his country. No record of Trudeau’s conversation is available, but Bartleman’s account rings true because of Trudeau’s friendship with Castro and his respect for the gains achieved by Cuba in the areas of health and education. In far wealthier Eastern Europe, the rapid end of communism had brought social disruption and sharp declines in life expectancy. Trudeau’s report for InterAction reflects these cautions, although it expresses the consistent view that a democratic state with a market economy and a strong system of social support is the best guarantee of Aristotle’s ideal of the good life.18

  Trudeau’s conversations with Castro and with other authoritarian leaders are marked by an absence of discussion of human rights. Indeed, Trudeau seems to have been intrigued by strong leaders, even dictators, and especially those on the left, although Singapore’s authoritarian conservative prime minister Lee Kuan Yew was a particular favourite. While it is easy to point to Trudeau’s Jesuit training, with its emphasis on the role of an elite, and his own early flirtations with anti-democratic movements, as the causes for this attraction, the reasons were likely more diverse: a sense of history drawn principally from the classics, in which leadership plays a dominant role in interpretation; his intellectual approach to Roman Catholicism, with its traditions of hierarchy and obedience, and its historical ambiguity toward the modern nation-state; and, finally, a traveller’s sense that different countries develop different systems, all with their own validity. When Trudeau took his sons to visit China in 1990, shortly after the Tiananmen Square attack on students and demonstrators, the Chinese treated them to a series of banquets. In Sacha’s memory, “When called to speak, my father would invariably refer very delicately to the sad difficulties that China had recently faced.” China, he stressed, “is an ancient land with its own internal imperatives … outsiders simply cannot know what is best for China or how it needs to travel down its chosen paths.” Missteps in such an immense land, Trudeau later told the boys in explanation, “lead to death and suffering on a gargantuan scale.” It was best, then, to make haste slowly toward the spring, when thousands of flowers—liberty, freedom, and democracy—would flourish.19

  The world at the time was much more interesting than Canada, as China and Russia reformed, Reagan and Gorbachev met and talked nuclear disarmament, and the Cold War began its final thaw. Yet the Western world had become conservative, with Reagan and Thatcher bestriding their group like a mighty colossus and Mulroney following in their wake. With liberals and the left on the retreat, there would be no meaningful international appointments for Trudeau, as many had suspected when he undertook his peace initiative in his last months in office. In Quebec, Robert Bourassa made a comeback, sweeping to victory on December 2, 1985. The Liberal win seemed to confirm Trudeau’s declaration that separatism was dead, but the aging fighter did not trust Bourassa. People who knew Trudeau best invariably confirm that Bourassa was near the top of the list of people he disliked. Meanwhile, in Ottawa, during his first years in power, the new Conservative prime minister kept a respectful distance—though Mulroney’s later animosity toward Trudeau brims over in his memoirs. He called Trudeau on appropriate occasions, as when he received the Order of the Companions of Honour, and he appointed him in March 1986 as Canada’s representative at the funeral of Trudeau’s assassinated friend, the Swedish socialist premier Olof Palme. Yet Bourassa and Mulroney had a personal friendship, enhanced greatly by Bourassa’s quiet support from the provincial Liberals for Mulroney’s Tories in his first campaign. They were ready to make a deal.

  The deal came together on April 30, 1987, at Meech Lake in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa, when after a long day of bargaining, Mulroney and the premiers announced that they had reached agreement on five key items: a provincial role in appointments to the Senate and the Supreme Court; entrenchment in the Constitution of the Cullen-Couture agreement, through which Quebec essentially gained control of the choice of immigrants to the province; limitations on federal spending power in areas of provincial jurisdiction, with provision for both opting out and compensation; an amending formula that gave a veto to Quebec; and recognition of Quebec as a distinct society, along with constitutional recognition of French and English minorities
throughout the country. Trudeau had known that the constitutional negotiations were proceeding, and Bourassa had even told him about his five “conditions.” Although Mulroney had spoken publicly about the need for Quebec to find an honourable place in Confederation, when he met with Trudeau in the late summer of 1984 he agreed that, if needed, the former prime minister could advise him on constitutional matters.* Like nearly all Canadians, including the participants, Trudeau had been skeptical that the retreat at Meech Lake would produce an agreement.20

  Knowing that approval from Trudeau would matter, both the federal and the Quebec governments sent representatives to test his reaction. They dutifully pointed out that he had, in the past, supported many elements of the accord, either at Victoria in 1971 or in his constitutional proposals later in the decade. They failed, however, to sway his doubts about the distinct society, the spending power, and the provincial role in the Supreme Court and the Senate. He told Gérard Pelletier that he must speak out to Canadians, and his old friend put him in touch with the editor of La Presse. On May 27 Trudeau published his angry denunciation of the accord in its columns. There he called Mulroney a “weakling,” an unworthy successor to all previous Canadian prime ministers. Two days later he appeared on the CBC program The Journal, where a critical Barbara Frum consistently emphasized that he stood alone against all the premiers and the three major political parties. Trudeau was not intimidated. In a grey suit with a rose completely open on his lapel, a slouching Trudeau initially showed his sixty-six years. But he soon came alive as he explained that although he had been “remarkably silent” since leaving politics, the Meech Lake proposal put the nation’s future at stake, and he would be silent no more. The strength of his passion and the simplicity of his argument—there could not be “two Canadas” in the Constitution—animated and increasingly drove the angry debate that consumed Canadian political life for the next three years.

  Once Quebec formally ratified the accord on June 23, the other provinces had to follow suit within a strict three-year limit. Trudeau’s attack became a catalyst for others to speak out against Meech: Aboriginal groups had been ignored in the terms of the agreement, women had been excluded from participation in the discussions, and many others worried about a weaker federal government. Historian Michael Bliss has described the problems caused by the lengthy ratification period and the contradictory position of its advocates: “[Meech] was fundamentally a contradictory set of propositions, and as people talked about it the contradictions became very apparent. Bourassa and the Quebecers were saying this was the greatest gain since the Quebec Act, and people like [Ontario Premier] David Peterson and the other premiers were saying, ‘Oh, this is just symbolism; it doesn’t mean anything at all.’” Trudeau rejected Peterson’s arguments directly and most notably when he testified on March 30, 1988, before the Senate committee of the whole, which was considering the Meech Lake Accord.

  In a remarkable six hours of testimony, Trudeau began eloquently by discussing why the ancient Greek Thucydides had proved to be so great a historian: he wrote, Trudeau said, knowing that Athens, like all things human, would not last forever. The time would come when Canada, too, would no longer exist, but when it disappeared, “let it go with a bang and not a whimper.” As feisty as he was in his conversation with Barbara Frum, Trudeau now called on the Senate, as the chamber of sober second thought, to strike down the agreement. He refused to discuss Liberal leader John Turner’s support of the accord; it was governments that made decisions, he countered, not opposition leaders. To assertions that the accord merely corrected what had been left out of the 1982 constitutional agreement, Trudeau replied: “There was no point in winning a referendum if we were going to give to those who lost it everything we got by winning it.” When the journalist Michel Vastel began shouting from the gallery, “En français,” Trudeau turned on him, as Vastel was being ejected, and said, ominously: “Last time, as far as I know, I spoke in French, and what I said was not widely reported by the French media.” Several times sympathetic senators broke into applause, while Trudeau’s energy and passion never wavered.21

  In three years the strings binding Meech together came undone, first in October 1987 in New Brunswick, where Frank McKenna, the newly elected Liberal premier, said he would not ratify Meech without amendment; then in Manitoba, where a minority government depended on Liberal leader Sharon Carstairs, a vocal opponent of Meech; and, fatefully, in Newfoundland in April 1989, when Liberal leader Clyde Wells promised in his successful election campaign that he would reopen Meech. Brian Mulroney wrote in his memoirs that Wells turned for advice to Trudeau, “whom he admired greatly and whose rigid, almost messianic views he worshipped. Trudeau now had his camel’s nose inside the tent.”22

  Opposition to Meech in English Canada had intensified in December 1988, when the Bourassa government introduced Bill 178. It used the notwithstanding clause to nullify a Supreme Court decision against French-only public advertising. Turner’s defeat in the federal election that year and the ensuing Liberal leadership campaign also made Meech an issue within the Liberal Party. Chrétien, who had left federal politics in 1985, emerged as the favourite and the heir to the Trudeau tradition, although he remained ambiguous about his opposition to Meech. His leading opponent, Montreal businessman Paul Martin, supported Meech openly and arranged to meet Trudeau for lunch at Montreal’s private Mount Royal Club. As they sat in the dining room, recognized by all around them, Martin asked Trudeau why he opposed Meech. “Do you support it?” Trudeau asked, before their food arrived. Martin no sooner began to answer than Trudeau threw his napkin on the table and walked out. Meech trumped manners in the spring of 1990.

  At another luncheon in Ottawa, Trudeau agreed to speak about Meech to an elite gathering at the Rideau Club. The invitation came from the eminent former civil servant Gordon Robertson, who frequently joked that he was Pierre Trudeau’s first and last boss when he supervised him at the Privy Council in the early 1950s. Trudeau began, as he had in an earlier Senate presentation, by saying that two clear visions of Canada were being presented, one that envisaged a decentralized and unbalanced federation and another that emphasized the equality of citizens and its parts. Jack Pickersgill—the principal aide to Mackenzie King and St. Laurent, a minister under St. Laurent and Pearson, and the best parliamentary performer of his time with the exception of John Diefenbaker—sat formidably at Trudeau’s immediate right, hostile to the core. The debate was bitter and direct, and the long partnership and friendship between Robertson and Trudeau ended that day. Trudeau may have been making his mark, but he was also making new enemies.23

  The Liberal leadership convention coincided with the fateful day of the Meech Lake Accord, June 23, 1990. Just as Chrétien became leader of the party on the first ballot, Meech came apart as an Aboriginal member of the Manitoba legislature, Elijah Harper, refused to participate in the unanimous consent necessary for Meech’s passage. Meanwhile, in Newfoundland, Clyde Wells allowed time to run out on the accord. Meech was dead, and in the eyes of many, Trudeau had been the assassin.

  But Brian Mulroney was not ready to give up on his ambitions to succeed in Quebec where, in his view, Trudeau had failed. He returned to the bargaining table, took into account the opposition to the Meech accord, and pointed to what he regarded as the consequences of its failure—the emergence of a new Reform Party in western Canada, which gave articulate voice to its grievances, and even more troublingly, the creation of the Bloc Québécois under the leadership of Mulroney’s former Quebec lieutenant, Lucien Bouchard. Arguing that there was one last chance to keep Canada together, Joe Clark, now Mulroney’s point man on the constitutional file, used his considerable negotiating skill to bring Wells, McKenna, and other leaders together, including Aboriginal chiefs and the heads of a variety of prominent interest groups. Another accord was reached, similar to Meech Lake but with a “Canada Clause,” which was intended to dilute the attacks on a “distinct society” for Quebec. In late August 1992, this Charlott
etown Accord received approval from the premiers, Aboriginal leaders, territorial leaders, the NDP, and the Liberals under their new leader, Jean Chrétien. But unlike the Meech Lake Accord, Charlottetown would not be decided by the various leaders alone; rather, it would face a referendum where “the people” would affirm their support in both English Canada and Quebec. The date was set for October 26, 1992—less than two months after its ratification.

  Trudeau despised both the accord and the historical interpretation it represented. At the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall on March 21, 1991, with Chief Justice Brian Dickson sitting before him, he attacked the justices of the Supreme Court, including Dickson himself, who had made up the majority in the 1981 decision on patriation of the Constitution. By this decision they had promoted political compromise rather than legality, he argued, and the federal government had been weakened vis-à-vis the provinces as it moved forward on patriation. What the future might bring was uncertain, but, he declaimed, “it is not too early to observe that, with the passage of time, the fading of memoires, the growth of a guilt complex at Queen’s Park, plus much falsifying of history in Ottawa, the subsequent allegation—fabricated by many of Quebec’s opinion leaders—that their province was humiliated in 1982, gradually took on the appearance of historical fact.” As a result the “stage was set for an unprecedented abdication of sovereign powers by the federal government, undertaken in order to placate those very politicians who had merely played the game of ‘loser takes all,’ and who modestly asked for nothing more than to have their cake and eat it too.” Dickson was enraged by this accusation and confronted Trudeau personally, telling him that he rejected everything he said. Trudeau quipped, “Well, I did appoint you chief justice.” Dickson was not appeased and said later that “Trudeau would have been better advised to have maintained his self-imposed vow of silence.”24 Trudeau broke the vow frequently as he challenged the Charlottetown agreement, first in an article for Maclean’s and L’Actualité on September 28, and then in a presentation at the Montreal restaurant Maison du Egg Roll, which was published and widely distributed under the title “A Mess That Deserves a Big No.” His impact was immediate and significant: the polls suddenly began to shift from approval to disapproval as Mulroney, whose popularity now lingered below 20 percent, became an issue. In the referendum Charlottetown was defeated nationally 54.3 to 45.7 percent. Trudeau was soon identified as the major influence, and commentators pointed out that within forty-eight hours of his Egg Roll declaration, the polls had reversed from 43 to 29 percent in favour to 46 to 34 percent against. After the defeat, Bernard Ostry, a former Trudeau-appointed public servant, called Mulroney and was, in the prime minister’s words, “pretty profane.” He had “a few choice words for Trudeau and his henchmen Keith Davey, Jim Coutts, and Jerry Grafstein, who, among other things, ‘spend all their fucking time either screwing Jean Chrétien or Canada’—they want,” he claimed, “to make certain that no one succeeds where their guy failed.” A furious Bob Rae, the New Democratic Ontario premier, blamed Trudeau for making “anti-French feeling respectable.” He would “never forgive him” for becoming a source for angry Ontarians who used “Trudeau’s words to justify their anti-French sentiments.”25