Just Watch Me

by John English

  27. Conversation with Henry Kissinger, March 2008.

  28. Report on the conference is found in EAP, RG25, box 10105, file 20-CD4-9-Trudeau P.e. FP(2).

  29. The quotations are found in Brian Shaw, The Gospel according to Saint Pierre (Richmond Hill, Ont.: Pocket Books, 1969), 77, 240.

  30. Trudeau, Beyond Reason, 51–54; interview with Margaret Trudeau, Feb. 2006.

  31. Ibid., 54–55. His travel agenda is found in TP, MG 26 020, vol. 17, files 11–12, LAC. Trudeau wrote the preface to MacInnis’s book Underwater Man (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975). MacInnis remained a good friend of Trudeau. Conversation with Joe MacInnis, July 2009.

  32. Interviews with Carroll Guérin, May–Aug. 2007 and July 2009. Ms. Guérin gave me copies of the letter described and some other relevant information.

  33. Trudeau, Beyond Reason, 57–60; interview with Margaret Trudeau, Feb. 2006.

  34. The reference to a November meeting with Streisand is in TP, MG 26 020, vol. 53, file 15, LAC; Trudeau, Beyond Reason, 65–66.

  35. James Sinclair to Trudeau, Dec. 20, 1970, TP, MG 26 02, vol. 53, file 10, LAC; Trudeau, Beyond Reason, 67–70.

  36. Speech described in Ottawa Journal, March 5, 1971.

  37. Trudeau, Beyond Reason, 74; interviews with Margaret Trudeau (Feb. 2006), Madeleine Gobeil (May 2006), Carroll Guérin (Aug. 2007), and Marc Lalonde (Aug. 2007); confidential discussions.

  38. Trudeau, Beyond Reason, 77–80; interview with Margaret Trudeau, Feb. 2006.

  39. Ottawa Journal, March 5, 1971; Vancouver Sun, March 5, 1971; Le Devoir, March 8, 1971; and Globe and Mail, March 6, 1971.

  CHAPTER FIVE: VICTORIA’S FAILURE

  1. Richard Simeon, Federal-Provincial Diplomacy: The Making of Recent Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). See also Gordon Robertson, Memoirs of a Very Civil Servant: Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), chap. 13. The Quebec argument is presented in Claude Morin, Quebec versus Ottawa: The Struggle for Self-Government 1960–1972 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976). This tome incorporates and adds to two earlier works in French by Morin, who was the lead Quebec civil servant in the negotiations during the period described. He states in his preface that the English version of the book will reveal why Quebec turned to sovereignty as a result of the “struggle” in which he fought for Quebec against the federal government.

  2. Philip Girard, Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Osgoode Society, 2005), 368–69.

  3. Pierre Trudeau, Memoirs (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993), 230.

  4. Trudeau’s classic article was “Les Octrois fédéraux aux universités,” Cité libre, Feb. 1957, 9–31. See the discussion of his attitude in John English, Citizen of the World, vol. 1 of The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006), 315–16.

  5. See Pierre Trudeau, “The Values of a Just Society,” 362, and Thomas Shoyama, “Fiscal Federalism in Evolution,” in Towards a Just Society: The Trudeau Years, ed. Thomas S. Axworthy and Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Markham, Ont.: Viking, 1990), 226–34.

  6. Robertson, Civil Servant, 272ff.; John Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs 1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 46–47; and interview with Marc Lalonde, Aug. 2007. A good contemporary account, deeply informed by prominent sources, is Anthony Westell, Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1972), chap. 1.

  7. Gordon Gibson to Marc Lalonde, May 10, 1971, TP, MG 26 03, vol. 121, file 313.05, LAC. This memorandum attaches a Le Devoir editorial reporting on a statement by prominent intellectual Fernand Dumont, who had written that future historians would charge Trudeau with breaking up Canada. Trudeau said the comments were amusing, since his old acquaintance Dumont wanted Canada to break up.

  8. Robertson, Civil Servant, 272ff.; Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review 1971, 46–47; and interview with Marc Lalonde, Aug. 2007.

  9. Robertson, Civil Servant, 277–82; Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review 1971, 58–59.

  10. Turner to Mr. Cummings, June 30, 1971, TUP, MG 26 Q4, vol. 6, file 11, LAC. (I am indebted to Paul Litt, Turner’s biographer, for this reference); Trudeau, Memoirs, 233–34; and Le Devoir, June 22, 23, 1971. Bourassa’s aide Charles Denis points out that all the advice Bourassa received was against acceptance and argues that Trudeau overemphasized the extent of agreement at Victoria (Charles Denis, Robert Bourassa: La Passion de la politique [Montréal: Fides, 2006], 148–51). Unlike Trudeau, Bourassa courted Ryan assiduously. According to L. Ian MacDonald, Bourassa only once failed to consult Ryan on an important decision—the result being a blistering editorial from Ryan the following morning. Bourassa never made the mistake again. L. Ian MacDonald, From Bourassa to Bourassa: Wilderness to Restoration, 2nd ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2002), 6.

  11. Globe and Mail, June 23, 1971.

  12. On the Quebec labour movement and the CEQ, see Ralph Guentzel, “‘Pour un pays à la mesure des aspirations des travailleurs québécois’: L’aile socialiste du mouvement syndical québécois et l’indépendantisme (1972–1982),” in Michel Sarra-Bournet, ed., Les Nationalismes au Québec du XIXème au XXIème siècle (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 158; Le Devoir, Sept. 16, 1971.

  13. Trudeau quoted in Westell, Paradox, 49; Beetz, “Memorandum pour le Premier Ministre,” June 12, 1972, TP, MG 26 020, vol. 23, file 12, LAC. This file contains other memoranda by Beetz, including one written on Feb. 15, 1972, where he uses the term “les grands feudataires.”

  14. Morin, Quebec versus Ottawa, 161.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Raymond Blake, “Social Policy and Constitutional Reform: The Case of Canada’s Family Allowance Program in the 1970s,” public policy paper 52, Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy, Dec. 2007.

  17. Trudeau, Memoirs, 232.

  18. Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, The Magnificent Obsession, vol. 1 of Trudeau and Our Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 124; interview with John Turner, May 2003; Dion quoted in Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review 1971, 76; and tapes of collective interview with colleagues of Trudeau, Dec. 9, 2002; March 5, 2003; and March 17, 2003, LAC.

  19. Claude Lemelin in Le Devoir, July 21, 1972. Studies of official bilingual-ism have revealed that support for French education outside Quebec grew significantly after the Official Languages Act was passed. And despite much criticism of the act itself in the media in Quebec, the support for official bilingualism was extremely high in Quebec: 98 percent of francophones polled in 2002 said that it was “very important” or “important” to them. The percentage elsewhere varied from a high of 76 percent in Atlantic Canada to 63 percent in British Columbia. Andrew Parkin and André Turcotte, Le Bilinguisme: Appartient-il au passé ou à l’avenir? (Ottawa: Centre de recherche et d’information sur le Canada, March 2004). Susan Trofimenkoff, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Toronto: Gage, 1983), is the source of the statistics on the doubling of the francophone percentage in the military and the public service. Trudeau’s description of the “English Only” atmosphere is in his Memoirs, 119.

  20. See Le Devoir, Oct. 9, 1971; Fernand Dumont in Le Devoir, Oct. 26, 1971; Christian Dufour, A Canadian Challenge: Le Défi québécois (Lantiville, B.C.: Oolichan, 1989); McRoberts criticizes Trudeau’s multiculturalism in an interview with Robert Bothwell in Bothwell, Canada and Quebec: One Country, Two Histories, rev. ed. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), 235–36; Arthur Schlesinger, The Disunity of America: Reflections of a Multicultural Society, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1998); Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, rev. ed. (Toronto: Penguin, 2002); Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance (Toronto: Penguin, 2006); Kwame Anthony Appiah prefers the term “cosmopolitanism,” one that resonates with some of Trudeau’s earlier writings and with the sign on
his dorm-room door at Harvard, which declared him a “citizen of the world” (see Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers [New York: Norton, 2007], xiii); Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991); Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (Québec: Government of Quebec, 2008); and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Putnam’s presentation, which argues for short-to medium-term “anomie” but for longer-term benefits based on American historical experience, is found in “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2007), 137–74. Toronto Star reported Helliwell’s research with the title “Toronto, the Sad?” (Dec. 30, 2007). It pointed out that Toronto did not make the top ten of Canadian cities. Saint John was first, followed by a group of smaller cities. Helliwell emphasizes the importance of government action in integrating immigrants into their new society, and he develops contrasts between Canada and the United States in this respect, using evidence such as how quickly immigrants become citizens and how many adopt hyphenated identities. His work is part of the larger Social Interactions, Identity, and Well-Being project of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. A recent edited collection (Will Kymlicka and Keith Banting, eds., Multiculturalism and the Welfare State: Recognition and Redistribution in Contemporary Democracies [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006]) points out the international context of the debate over the impact of multiculturalism on the sense of collectivity, which some argue is necessary in the “welfare state.” The essays in the book suggest that the jury is still out on the question of the impact of multi culturalism on redistribution and the welfare state.

  21. See Mildred Schwartz, Public Opinion and Canadian Identity (Scarborough: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1967), 86–88.

  22. On the multicultural concern in the Pearson years, see J.L. Granatstein, Canada 1957–1967: The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 248. Jean Burnet’s Canadian Encyclopedia entry on multiculturalism states specifically that the term “came into vogue in the 1960s to counter ‘biculturalism’” (http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=A1ARTA0005511). Conservative senator Paul Yuzyk, a Manitoban of Ukrainian extraction, claimed that he developed the term in 1964 in response to the royal commission. The speech describing Yuzyk’s claim (made by Senator Rhéal Bélisle) is in Canada, Senate Debates (July 24, 1986). Yuzyk’s commemorative website emphasizes his contributions to multiculturalism and to the Ukrainian community: http://www.yuzyk.com/biog-e.shtml.

  23. The formal title of the White Paper is Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969, Presented to the First Session of the Twenty-Eighth Parliament by the Honourable Jean Chrétien (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969), v.

  24. The Cabinet debate is found in Cabinet Conclusions, RG2, PCO, Series A-5-1, vol. 6381, Sept. 23, 1971, LAC; Canada, House of Commons Debates (8 Oct. 1971).

  25. John Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review 1971, 96–98; Toronto Daily Star, Oct. 9, 1971; and Le Devoir, Oct. 9, 1971.

  CHAPTER SIX: THE PARTY IS OVER

  1. The Gallup polling data reveal that Liberal support remained fairly solid until the October Crisis. After that it diminished, followed by a sudden drop in late 1971. In August 1971, the results had been 42 percent Liberal, 24 percent Conservative, 24 percent NDP, and 10 percent Créditiste/other. The results are found in John Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs 1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 19.

  2. Joseph Wearing, The L-Shaped Party: The Liberal Party of Canada 1958–1980 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1981), 187–88.

  3. Ibid., 192.

  4. Ibid., 162–63; Richard Gwyn, who worked in Eric Kierans’ office in the early 1970s, says that Davey’s “consuming passion wasn’t so much programs as the programming of programs….” (The Northern Magus: Pierre Trudeau and Canadians [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980], 83). The influence of Davey is evident in LPC, MG 28-IV3, vol. 1083, LAC. Richard Stanbury Diary, privately held, personal copy given to me by its author.

  5. See John English, Citizen of the World, vol. 1 of The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2006), 312–24.

  6. Stanbury Diary, Oct. 2, 1969; James Robertson, “The Canadian Electoral System” (briefing paper); Parliamentary Information and Research Service, BP437-E, Library of Parliament.

  7. Wearing, L-Shaped Party, 163. For the transcript of Trudeau’s fascinating remarks to the Harrison Hot Springs conference, see Tom Hockin, ed., Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 97–100. Stanbury Diary, June 10, 1970.

  8. Stanbury Diary, Sept. 15, 1971; Wearing, L-Shaped Party, 169–71; Toronto Star, Nov. 22, 1970; and conversation with Allen Linden in early eighties.

  9. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 478.

  10. Marc Lalonde, “The Changing Role of the Prime Minister’s Office,” Canadian Public Administration (winter 1971): 511; Arthur Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); and Gordon Robertson, “The Changing Role of the Privy Council Office,” Canadian Public Administration (winter 1971), which argued that there was far more responsibility and accountability with Trudeau than with Mackenzie King, who “would have preferred to hold everything close to his chest to be brought out for consideration as, when and how he preferred, with his ministers taken by surprise and circulated well in advance” (488). Robert McKenzie’s influential study of the “iron law of oligarchy” within British political parties implicitly points to the centralization that occurs with the parties themselves and, therefore, with parties in power (British Political Parties: The Distribution of Power within the Conservative and Labour Parties, 2nd ed. [London: Heinemann, 1963]). Interview with Marc Lalonde, Aug. 2007.

  11. Donald Savoie, Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability in Canada and the United Kingdom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Jeffrey Simpson, The Friendly Dictatorship (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001); Hockin, ed., Apex of Power; and Edward Goldenberg, The Way It Works: Inside Ottawa (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006), 388. A contemporary attack is Walter Stewart, Shrug: Trudeau in Power (Toronto: New Press, 1971). The socialist Stewart vilified Trudeau’s “presidential” style of government, arguing that he preferred “parliamentary democracy, with all its sloppiness, its tedium, even its name-calling, to the single-minded rule of an overbearing man…. Unless some of the power is wrested away from the Supergroup, the Prime Minister will soon live in that happiest of all political worlds, the one without an opposition” (3).

  12. The survey, “Attitudes about Trudeau, October 1970,” is found in ALP, MG 32 C-36, vol. 1, file 2, LAC. Christina McCall-Newman, Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982), 126. Pickersgill expressed his bitterness to me personally many times during this period.

  13. Henry Lawless, “Correspondence Analysis—July 1969,” TP, MG 26 03, vol. 290, file 319-1, LAC.

  14. “Attitudes about Trudeau.” Emphasis in quote is in the original.

  15. Charles Trudeau to Pierre Trudeau, June 20, 1971, TP, MG 26 02, vol. 53, file 28, LAC.

  16. Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 16–17.

  17. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin, 2007), 61.

  18. Trowbridge, quoted in Alfred Eckes, Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 199. See also Thomas Zeiler, American Trade and Power in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

  19. Trudeau, quoted in Anthony Westell, Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister (Scarborough: Prentice
-Hall, 1972), 147.

  20. Bulloch gives the history of his crusade, complete with the bathtub incident, in http://www.cfib.ca/legis/ontario/pdf/on0212.pdf. See also I. H. Asper, The Benson Iceberg: A Critical Analysis of the White Paper on Tax Reform in Canada (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970), xv.

  21. Danson to Trudeau, Nov. 30, 1970, GP, MG 32 C-86, vol. 1, file 6, LAC.

  22. Saywell, ed., Canadian Annual Review 1971, 18–19; Canada, House of Commons Debates (17 Dec. 1971).

  23. The quotation and the description of the Waffle’s role is from Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005), 188–89; Westell, Paradox, 1, 3.

  24. The Australian objections are found in “Discussions with Canadian Prime Minister, Mr. Pierre Trudeau,” Cabinet Minutes, May 19, 1970, Series A5852, C0821, National Archives of Australia. The paper incident and Nixon’s concurrent efforts are described in Margaret MacMillan, Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2006), 166–67. See also the account in Robert Bothwell, Alliance and Illusion: Canada and the World, 1945–1984 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 308–11. In his memorandum indicating that agreement had been reached, Under-secretary of State for External Affairs Ed Ritchie worried that Taiwan was being forgotten and isolated, but Trudeau seemed much less concerned. Ritchie to “all departments,” Oct. 13, 1970, EAP, RG 25, file 10840, dossier 20-1-2PRC, vol. 10, LAC. Much background on the China recognition is found in Paul Evans and B. Michael Frolic, eds., Reluctant Adversaries: Canada and the People’s Republic of China 1949–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), especially Section 8, which concentrates on Trudeau’s personal and political reasons for desiring recognition. The Finance Department had reservations, and the problem of Taiwan was acknowledged but largely ignored.