Trudeaumania

The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Robert Wright

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781443445009
• eBook ISBN: 9781443445023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Finalist for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize

A Hill-Times Best Book of the Year

Nearly twenty years after his death and more than thirty since his retirement from active politics, Pierre Elliott Trudeau is at long last receding from the lived memory of Canadians. But despite the distance of time, he still holds court in the minds of many, and today his son Justin now lives at 24 Sussex Drive, his own man, though still a Trudeau holding Canada’s highest office.

Trudeaumania is about Pierre Trudeau’s rise to power in 1968. This is a story we thought we knew—the epic saga of the hipster Montrealer who drove up to Ottawa in his Mercedes in 1965, wowed the country with his dictum that “the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation,” rocked the new medium of television like no one since JFK, and in scant months rode the crest of Canadians’ Centennial-era euphoria into power. This is Canada’s own Camelot myth. It embodies the quirkiness, the passion and the youthful exuberance we ascribe to the 1960s even now. Many of us cherish it. Unfortunately, it is almost entirely wrong. In 1968 Trudeau put forward his vision for Canada’s second century, without guile, without dissembling and without a hard sell. Take it or leave it, he told Canadians. If you do not like my ideas, vote for someone else. We took it.

By bestselling and award-winning author Robert Wright, Trudeaumania sets the record straight even as it illuminates this important part of our history and shines a light on our future.

CHAPTER ONE

THE STUBBORN ECCENTRIC

The city of Montreal was Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s lifelong home and the inspiration for nearly everything he accomplished over the course of his extraordinary life. With the exception of the two years he worked for the Privy Council Office, the nineteen he spent in federal politics, and another handful he spent travelling or studying abroad, he was an abiding fixture in the city of his birth. To a degree that is difficult to imagine today, when Canadians are always on the move and communities are ever changing, Trudeau was thoroughly, almost organically, integrated into the fabric and the rhythms of twentieth-century Montreal. He knew its streets, its social hierarchies, its traditions, its strictures. He spoke both its major languages and practised its predominant faith. He attended and later taught at some of its finest schools. He loved its history and its geography, its poets, its artists, and, of course, its women. Montreal cradled Pierre Trudeau as a child and again as an old man. He raised his boys there. He died there. And like generations of his forebears, he was laid to rest there.

What Trudeau knew above all—both of Montreal and of the province beyond it—was their politics.

Many aspects of Quebec’s political culture at mid-century are enduringly fascinating. But the key to understanding Trudeau’s unique place within it is the remarkable insularity of that culture. In the 1960s, the French-Canadian clerical, political, academic, and cultural elites were small, isolated (both by language and geography), and thoroughly intertwined. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Moreover, Quebecers seemed to know everything about everyone else—people’s family histories, where they had studied and with whom, where they had attended Mass, which organizations they had joined, which books and journals they had read, whose ideas and influences they had imbibed. Open almost any issue of Le Devoir in the Trudeaumania period, and you will discover an unmistakable subtext, a sense that the leading lights in Quebec society—even those who called themselves adversaries—were part of the same big extended family. They knew which names to drop. They knew how to ingratiate themselves with each other. They certainly knew how to push each other’s buttons.

This insularity helps to explain the virtually linear trajectory of Pierre Trudeau’s thinking about Quebec—from doctrinaire nationalist to uncompromising anti-nationalist. But more interestingly, and far more subtly, it helps to account for the decidedly non-linear and sometimes puzzling milieu in which those ideas took shape. To cite what is perhaps the best example of this insular world, Trudeau penned his most scathing critique of his nationalist adversaries, “La nouvelle trahison des clercs” (“The New Treason of the Intellectuals”), in the fall of 1961. One of the most ostensibly treacherous of those intellectuals was René Lévesque, then a provincial Liberal cabinet minister. Yet over the next two winters, Trudeau and Lévesque met fortnightly in Gérard Pelletier’s living room as part of a small group of progressives dedicated to charting Quebec’s future. (The other members were journalist André Laurendeau and labour leader Jean Marchand, both of whom were also nationalists.) In other words, the famously intense public debate between Lévesque and Trudeau that culminated in the 1980 referendum on sovereignty was but one layer of a long-running, even fraternal conversation between the two men.¹ The same familiarity was evident in Trudeau’s relationship with premiers Jean Lesage and Daniel Johnson, with prominent academics like Léon Dion, and with influential editorialists including Pierre Laporte and Claude Ryan.

It was this culture of familiarity that made Trudeau the black sheep among Quebec’s Quiet Revolutionaries and, ultimately, the nemesis of the separatists. But never did it make him, as his critics have claimed, un inconnu très connu (a famous outsider).

As political scientists Max and Monique Nemni have demonstrated so powerfully, Quebec’s hothouse political culture in the 1930s and the early 1940s was the crucible of Trudeau’s maturation as a thinker.²

If, in June 1968, Trudeau understood the separatist enthusiasms of Pierre Bourgault and his ilk, it is because the young Trudeau had himself embraced radical separatism and carried its slogans defiantly into the streets. In 1937, at the age of seventeen, he gave a speech to his Brébeuf classmates. “To maintain our French mentality,” he asserted, “what we must do is to preserve our language and to shun American civilization.”³ In November 1942, in the midst of World War II, Trudeau gave an even more conventionally nationalist speech in support of Jean Drapeau, then a young law student contesting a federal seat in the riding of Outremont. Both Drapeau and Trudeau believed that Prime Minister Mackenzie King had defiled democracy by backtracking on his promise not to conscript Canadians in the war against Hitler. “If we are not in a democracy,” Trudeau raged, “let the revolution begin without delay!”⁴As Trudeau would later admit, his youthful beliefs were almost entirely the product of his political isolation. Once he was outside the Quebec fishbowl, he abandoned them wholesale.

In 1944, just two years after his fiery anti-conscription speech, he set off for Harvard University to study political economy. There, at the age of twenty-five, Trudeau became, as he put it himself, a “citizen of the world.” He read foreign newspapers for the first time, mingled with American GIs who had served in Europe, and discussed world issues from an international perspective. Until then, the fight against European fascism had been little more than an abstract concept for him. (Never would Trudeau’s English-Canadian detractors let him forget the patent callousness of his horsing around in Prussian military regalia during the darkest days of the conflict.) The “historic importance” of World War II came as an epiphany to Trudeau. It changed everything, including his understanding of Quebec politics. “I realized that the Quebec of the time was away from the action, that it was living outside modern times,” he would later write. “Quebec had stayed provincial in every sense of the word, that is to say marginal, isolated, out of step with the evolution of the world.”⁵

Trudeau’s classroom training at Harvard, meanwhile, cemented his belief in the sacred importance of the individual. Under the influence of exiled European professors like the German Heinrich Brüning, he came to reject all collectivist thinking as fundamentally tyrannical. The first thing to go was the theory of corporatism. This was a reactionary ideology popular in Catholic Quebec (and Catholic Europe) that envisaged a hierarchical conception of social organization based on the family.⁶ Like practically all young French Canadians of his generation, Trudeau had been a devotee of corporatism. No longer. “French-Canadian thinkers, politicians, journalists, and editors advocated corporatism as a kind of extraordinary panacea,” Trudeau would later say of his own formative years. “No one was far-sighted or courageous enough to say that it was all nonsense.”⁷ Although the adult Trudeau would occasionally write as a democratic socialist, after Harvard his deepest political convictions would remain resolutely those of a near-classic liberal. “The view that every human must be free to shape his own destiny,” he said, “became for me a certainty.”⁸

Harvard (and the smattering of graduate courses Trudeau subsequently took at the École des sciences politiques in Paris and the London School of Economics) also confirmed his status as a self-styled “contrarian.” He was always happiest “paddling against the current,” he liked to say. In the context of mid-century Quebec, this stance meant challenging nationalist thinking in whatever form happened to be au courant. By definition, nationalism privileges one collectivity vis-à-vis others. It protects the in-group from the outsiders. Seen from the perspective of liberal individualism, nationalism is fundamentally unjust—irrespective of whether it is bundled with high-minded appeals to “imagined communities” or any other such fiction.⁹ “A nationalistic government is by nature intolerant, discriminatory, and, when all is said and done, totalitarian,” Trudeau would aver throughout his political career. “A truly democratic government cannot be ‘nationalist,’ because it must pursue the good of all its citizens, without prejudice to ethnic origin.”¹⁰

Not surprisingly, Trudeau also cast off the popular nationalist version of Quebec history promulgated by the Université de Montréal historian Michel Brunet. Just as Trudeau was renouncing corporatism, Professor Brunet, just two years Trudeau’s senior, was reimagining it as a defining moment in Quebec’s national rebirth. “Many French Canadians began to ask themselves if it would not be more realistic to promote the economic and cultural progress of their community inside the borders of Quebec,” Brunet would write of the 1930s, “instead of waging exhausting and fruitless fights to establish bilingualism throughout Canada.”¹¹ The question was, of course, rhetorical. Well into the sixties, Brunet and other members of the so-called Montreal School would urge Quebecers to use the tools of modern democracy to reclaim Quebec as their “fatherland.”¹² After the horrors of the Nazi period, the suggestion that Quebec should be the fatherland of the French Canadians repelled Trudeau. So, too, did Brunet’s willingness to scapegoat English Canada for Quebec’s economic underdevelopment. Blaming “les Anglais” for Quebec’s problems was “ridiculous,” Trudeau would say flatly.¹³

In 1948, Trudeau embarked on a year-long spiritual quest that took him to Asia via Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He intended the trip not as an intellectual exercise but as an immersion in the language, dress, and labour of local people. “This trip was basically a challenge I set myself,” he later wrote, “as I had done with sports, with canoeing expeditions, and with intellectual explorations. I wanted to know, for instance, whether I could survive in a Chinese province without knowing a word of Chinese, or would be able to travel across a war-torn country without ever succumbing to panic.”¹⁴ He got his wish, experiencing jail in Jerusalem and Belgrade, an attack by the Viet Cong when he was on his way to Saigon, myriad death threats, and deportation from at least one Communist-bloc country. “It was incredible,” he later wrote. “Everywhere I went seemed to be at war.”¹⁵ Israel, Pakistan, Indochina, China, Iraq—anywhere Trudeau found himself on the front lines, he was only too happy to rely on “the courage and kindness of ordinary people.”¹⁶ Such experiences made him more worldly and less intolerant, shaping the two precepts that would later govern his conduct even with his nominal Cold War enemies: that people of differing views could agree to disagree, and that one must always seek out the humanity of one’s enemies.¹⁷

Canadians would come to know Trudeau as tough (“Just watch me”), irreverent (“Fuddle duddle”), and even crass (“Mangez de la merde”). He had a sharp mind, an even sharper pen, and a taste for the jugular when he was heckled or provoked. But once he had jettisoned his youthful fanaticism and embraced “reason over passion,” he was almost never hateful—not even to those who would make death threats against him.

As Justin Trudeau has said often, most poignantly in his October 2000 eulogy for his father, Pierre’s highest ideal in political debate was to critique his opponents’ ideas without demeaning them personally—an ideal he would occasionally honour in the breach.¹⁸ Yet well before he entered politics, tolerance and a genuine interest in people’s differences were defining features of Trudeau’s personal philosophy. He never wavered from this attitude or apologized for it. What is more, he seldom even bothered to explain it. As justice minister and as a Liberal leadership hopeful, for example, Trudeau would be accused of carrying “the stench of Sodom” into federal politics for having liberalized Canadian law on homosexuality, abortion, and divorce. Yet never did he strike back at his critics in kind, with ad hominem slurs. And never, even when the political dividends might have been considerable, did he attack any of the usual suspects—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, homosexuals, Americans, Cubans, Russians. He thus left himself wide open both to innuendo (that he was gay, or soft on crime, or irreligious) and to outright smears (that he was a Red or a fascist). And when his enemies manoeuvred to take full advantage, he gave every appearance that he could not have cared less.

As he observed at the height of Trudeaumania, such “garbage” was beneath Canadians. He had better things to worry about.

His world travels and his studies at an end, Trudeau returned to Montreal in the spring of 1949. He arrived just in time to witness the dramatic (and illegal) strike of five thousand miners at the town of Asbestos, Quebec. Trudeau drove out to the Eastern Townships with Gérard Pelletier, who was covering the strike for Le Devoir. Expecting to hang around for a day or two, Trudeau was instead drawn into the struggle on the strikers’ behalf. He attended meetings, made speeches, and, alongside Pelletier, ended up in police custody. At Asbestos, he later wrote, “I found a Quebec I did not really know, that of workers exploited by management, denounced by government, clubbed by police, and yet burning with fervent militancy.”¹⁹ In his seminal 1956 book La grève de l’amiante, Trudeau would describe the strike as a turning point in the history of Quebec. It exposed Quebec nationalism as an ideology of “discouraging impotence,” he observed, and moved Quebecers to confr...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: Trudeau to the Gallows!
• Chapter One: The Stubborn Eccentric
• Chapter Two: The Three Musketeers
• Chapter Three: Forks in the Road
• Chapter Four: From Celebration to Survival
• Chapter Five: The Sacred and the Profane
• Chapter Six: Now You’re Stuck with Me
• Chapter Seven: We Want Trudeau!
• Chapter Eight: Telling It Like It Is
• Chapter Nine: A Man for Tomorrow
• Chapter Ten: The Calm after the Storm
• Epilogue: Trudeaumania 2.0
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Robert Wright
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher