Pierre Elliott Trudeau (3 page)

While doing the research for this book I often felt as I did a few years ago doing research for a novel on the life of Jesus: that I had stepped into a war zone of vested interests and scholarly bloodletting, with no opinion unpartisan or untainted. Interestingly, Jesus, like Trudeau—though I
wouldn’t want to carry this analogy too far—was another of history’s contradiction-bridgers, surely one of the reasons his story has had such staying power. That is the fate of some stories: they speak so deeply to our hopes and fears, to the disjunctions of our lives and our wish to overcome them, that they pass from art to myth.

Michael Valpy, describing myth as what “reveals the deep patterns of meaning and coherence in a culture,” what “shows us who we dream ourselves to be,” has made the argument for Trudeau as “our one truly mythological prime minister.” There remain legions of dissenters, however, particularly in Quebec and in the West, who still grow apoplectic at such appraisals, and for whom the only proper application of the term
myth
to the Trudeau legacy is in the sense of unholy fiction, of a great lie perpetrated on the Canadian people. Even here the contradictions repeat themselves, for the more we learn of Trudeau, the more those two opposing summations of him seem inextricably intertwined.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those watershed years in human history that was almost enough to make even the most cynical believe in astrological forces. In France it was the year of May ’68; in Poland, of March ’68; in the United States, of Chicago ’68. It was the year of the Prague Spring. Of bra burning. Of
Hair.

In Canada we tend to look at 1967’s Expo as the evidence that we, too, even before Trudeau arrived on the scene, had been moving toward our own ’68. Thinking of Expo 67 as a precursor to the spirit of 1968, however, is a bit like thinking of Sunday school as a proper warm-up for a Grateful Dead concert. In the United States, in 1967, they had the Summer of Love: tens of thousands of youths descending on Haight-Ashbury from around the world with flowers in their hair and sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll on their minds. All this was a far cry from the official government ditties of Expo and its images of happy families and of high-end futurist real
estate. The Summer of Love was a sort of pollination event for 1968, sending its converts back out into the world to spread the good news about turning on and dropping out, though it was also a warning of the ephemeral nature of hippie ideals, quickly deteriorating into a sordid scene of crime, souvenir hawking, and drugs.

Most of us have learned by now to hang our heads in shame at the memory of hippie drug culture, though it may have been that hippies were merely self-medicating to dull the pain of forever banging their heads against the status quo. What we often forget is that in the short term, at least, the real story of 1968 was as much about the crushing suppression of the human spirit as about its assertion: in France, the massive protests gave way to betrayals and backroom deals that ended in the re-election of the Gaullists, stronger than ever; in Czechoslovakia, two hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops turned the Prague Spring into a Soviet winter. In China, one of the last hopes of Western Marxists after the disappointment of Stalin, 1968 was the year that Mao’s take on counterculture, the Cultural Revolution, completed its pendulum swing back to iron-fisted tyranny after leading the country to the brink of chaos. Meanwhile the United States saw the assassination of Martin Luther King; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; and finally the
election of that great standard-bearer of 1960s radicalism, Richard Nixon. Even bra burning, often cited as the inaugural moment of second-wave feminism, has been overbilled: the term arose after a smattering of protesters outside the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City dumped bras, girdles, and various other symbols of women’s oppression into a trash can, though the suggestion of setting fire to them was swiftly quashed by local police. On television sets across the nation, meanwhile, the Miss America pageant carried on uninterrupted.

Around the world, then, the most immediate outcome of 1968’s sudden flourishing of a new order was the brutal reaffirmation of the old one. Next to this titan clash of cosmic forces, an event like Expo 67 begins to seem, well, decidedly Canadian. Expo was not about counterculture but about Culture, with a very capital
C
—about claiming we actually had one. It wasn’t about taking down the Establishment but about establishing one.

“Now for me in those years,” journalist Rick Salutin has written, “what has since become a great icon of Canadian potential—Expo 67—signified nothing.” Salutin, back then, had done what any proper Canadian radical needed to do: he had left the country. “But Trudeau,” Salutin goes on, “—mere news reports about him—moved me.”

This is a remarkable statement coming from someone who was hobnobbing at the time with the Maoists and Fidelistas of the New Left down in Harlem and Washington Square. If Expo was no logical place to look for the spirit of 1968, then one would hardly have expected to find it in the Liberal Party of Canada, whose front man until then, Lester Pearson, was considered too boring and nice even by mainstream Canadians. When Pearson announced his retirement at the end of 1967, the principal contenders for his job were people like Paul Martin Sr. and Robert Winters and Mitchell Sharp, who were as establishment and staid a group of stuffed shirts as you could poke a fickle finger of fate at.

In this pack, Trudeau’s candidacy initially seemed a kind of joke. Here was someone whose only connection to the federal Liberals before 1965 had been to poke vicious fun at them in the pages of his magazine
Cité libre
. In 1963 he had taken particular aim at Pearson, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, referring to him as “the defrocked prince of peace” for allowing American nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. Yet a mere two years later he had stood for election as a Liberal MP, and within weeks of arriving in Ottawa was serving as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary. Back in Quebec, Trudeau’s only involvement in party politics until then, apart from a brief flirtation with the NDP’s predecessor, the CCF, had
been in ad hoc leftist movements and coalitions that he had quickly lost interest in or that had self-destructed. To many of his old political colleagues in Quebec—people like Claude Ryan and René Lévesque, with whom he had been allied in the fight against the corrupt regime of Maurice Duplessis—Trudeau’s defection to Ottawa seemed so much a departure from any of his previous leanings that they were left dumbfounded.

As with many of Trudeau’s seemingly cavalier gestures, there was probably a lot more calculation in his jump to the Liberals than met the eye. Yet it is almost certain he would not have made it—and hence that none of what happened to him in the crucial next three years would have come about—if he had merely been left to follow his own inclinations. Despite the image that has come down to us of Trudeau as the loner, as the one who followed his own road, at almost every crucial juncture in his life there was some significant figure whose influence over him was definitive. Looked at in this light, his meteoric rise begins to seem neither the happenstance event it was often played as at the time nor the coldly calculated one it was later suspected of being. Rather, Trudeau seems to have been urged toward his path by the people around him almost despite himself, as if they saw more clearly than he did that some mark of destiny
lay on him, that the moment would come when no one but he could draw the sword from the stone.

One man whose role it would be hard to overestimate in this period was Jean Marchand. Marchand, a union organizer and populist with tremendous street credibility in Quebec, was the real star the Liberals were after in 1965, in a desperate bid to rebuild their Quebec base after several of the more prominent Liberals there—always a touchy subject in Quebec—had fallen to scandals. Marchand had first met Trudeau during the Asbestos Strike of 1949, when the young Trudeau, to Marchand’s chagrin, had fired up the striking miners with revolutionary rhetoric as if he were preaching to his schoolmates rather than to men who had access to dynamite, and the will to use it. Nonetheless, Marchand had been struck by the ability of this citified member of the elite to speak to uneducated workers in terms they understood. He had kept up only sporadic contact with Trudeau in the intervening years, but when the Liberals approached Marchand in 1965 to head their Quebec team, he refused to sign on unless he was allowed to bring with him his friend Gérard Pelletier, then the editor of
La Presse,
and, somewhat bafflingly, Pierre Trudeau.

Somehow Marchand managed not only to talk the Liberals into accepting Trudeau—this was a man who not
long before had publicly condemned them as imbeciles and trained donkeys—but to talk Trudeau into accepting the Liberals. Trudeau was apparently in high spirits after agreeing to run, as if he were merely setting out on another of his great adventures. But he was to falter many times along the road, and each time it was Marchand who set him back on course. It was Marchand who talked him out of running in the rural riding of his ancestors and wrangled a safe urban one for him, the upscale and largely anglophone Mount Royal; it was Marchand who convinced him to stay in the race when Trudeau discovered he would be up against his old friend, the philosopher Charles Taylor, who was running for the NDP. Then in Ottawa, when Trudeau initially turned down the offer to serve as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary—as it happened, Trudeau was on a ski trip in the Alps when Pearson reached him—Marchand was on the phone to him at once. In the memoirs Trudeau published in 1993, he recalled Marchand’s reprimand: “What brought us here is that there’s a job to be done, and we have to grab every opportunity to do it.” One suspects that Marchand’s actual terms were a bit more colourful.

Marchand, it seemed, had Trudeau’s number, spurring him forward with a mix of coaxing and bullying that might have reminded Trudeau of another significant male in his life, his
father, Charles. Charles Trudeau, who died of hard living when Pierre was fifteen, had been in the habit of weeding out weakness from his son by challenging him to overcome it. In the first grade, for instance, when Pierre complained of a problem with his teacher, Charles refused to intervene, sending the shy young Pierre off to the school principal to solve the matter himself. The strategy worked: Trudeau proved so successful at meeting these challenges that they became a sort of addiction, each one emboldening him for the next until he came to seek out anything that smacked of a dare. Jean Marchand somehow understood this side of Trudeau and learned how to use it, goading him again and again into actions that flew in the face of the expected but that clearly had an appeal for Trudeau precisely for that reason. It made sense, as historian John English suggests in the first volume of his two-volume biography of Trudeau,
Citizen of the World,
that Trudeau would balk at accepting an offer from Pearson that would have him working so closely with a man he hardly knew and had never much liked. But once Marchand framed the job as a challenge, Trudeau embraced it wholeheartedly. Marchand, with shrewd prescience, foresaw great things for Trudeau, predicting to a Quebec colleague in Ottawa just after the election that Trudeau would be the Liberals’ “big man in French Canada” within a year, “eclipsing all the others.”

The other person who may have had Trudeau’s number was Pearson himself. Marchand had asked Pearson to give Trudeau some sort of position that would bring him in from the back benches, but it was Pearson’s idea to take Trudeau into his own office. A ministry would have been a mistake, not just because of Trudeau’s inexperience but because of the resentment still simmering against him in the rest of the caucus. But it was an act of some magnanimity on Pearson’s part to take as his aide a man who had so roundly pilloried him in his writings. It couldn’t have helped much that Trudeau’s “defrocked prince of peace” line—like several of the famous lines history has attributed to Trudeau—was one he had merely quoted from another writer. Yet Pearson, who had actually given as one of his reasons for choosing Trudeau as a candidate that he had always been impressed by his writings, had clearly decided well before Trudeau arrived in Ottawa that he would be an invaluable asset. It is often overlooked that the two major accomplishments we tend to associate with Trudeau—bilingualism and constitutional reform—grew out of initiatives he inherited from Pearson, who seemed to have understood better than most the formidable talents that Trudeau could bring to bear on them.

Trudeau expected to be put off in his new job with “some modest parliamentary chores and some pencil pushing.”
Instead Pearson immediately sent him on missions to Paris and the U.N. and to the countries of the fledgling Francophonie, where he hobnobbed with such post-colonial heroes of the day as President Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia. It is hard not to suspect an element of cunning in all this on Pearson’s part. Not only was Trudeau exactly the sort of sophisticate to send to places like Paris and to a poet-president like Senghor, but these missions had the added advantage of giving Trudeau an international profile—and a rather more statesmanlike one than that of Trudeau the vagabond from the less official travels of his youth—while keeping him out of the line of fire of the people gunning for him back in Ottawa.

Early in 1967, after some fifteen months of globetrotting, Trudeau got the call to come home. In the meantime Marchand and Pearson had been busy, clearing Cabinet of deadwood from the Quebec caucus, so that by April Pearson was able to offer Trudeau the justice ministry. By now Trudeau was fully in the game. He didn’t hesitate for a second, as he later put it, but went straight to the department’s top bureaucrats to get up to speed.

For most Canadians it was as justice minister that Trudeau first came to their attention. He took over the portfolio a rank outsider, known mainly as a playboy and a mav
erick and taken seriously only by the observant few; within a matter of months he would have national prominence and an aura of authority most politicians had to build over the course of years. Much of his rapid rise had to do with a decision he made only days after taking over his portfolio. For some time, legislation updating the country’s divorce laws and various controversial sections of the Criminal Code had been languishing in committee for lack of political will to push it through. “You’re a novice minister,” the civil servants said to Trudeau, in his version of events, “so perhaps it would be better to start with a less thorny issue.” But Trudeau, ever the contrarian, said, “No. I prefer to start with the most difficult one.”