MICHAEL BLISS
Michael Bliss is one of Canada’s best-known business, medical, and political historians. A professor at the University of Toronto, he has won both the Sir John A. Macdonald and the F.-X. Garneau medals of the Canadian Historical Association and the J.B. Tyrrell medal of the Royal Society of Canada. Among his many books is Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney. He was an early and active opponent of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords.
IT SEEMS EASY TO LOCATE Pierre Elliott Trudeau against the mainstream of Canadian political leadership. He was surely an outsider, a stranger, a maverick, a self-proclaimed contrarian. Against the Current, the title of his most recent book, says it all.
From the beginning, his style was unconventional. Trudeau was either a playboy dabbling in politics or a breath of fresh air, or perhaps a little of both, as he thumbed his nose at parliamentary protocol. Then, less than three years after entering politics, he was prime minister. No one else had ever come in from the cold so fast. No one ever received a warmer welcome than Trudeau, in the out-pouring of Trudeaumania in the 1968 election campaign. His style seemed unique and charismatic. “Had there ever been in Canada a national party leader quite like this?” historian Roger Graham later wrote. “Sir Wilfrid Laurier, let us say, sliding down a banister? Sir Robert Borden in goggles and flippers? Arthur Meighen in a Mercedes? Mackenzie King at judo? R.B. Bennett on skis?”
Had there ever been a prime minister who seemed so aloof and arrogant in office? A prime minister who told his political opponents to “fuck off” and “eat shit”? A prime minister who raised his middle finger to protesting constituents? A prime minister who taunted opposition MPS as “nobodies”? A prime minister who told Canadians to stop expecting that government should be Santa Claus? A prime minister who said, “I’m not really governing to be re-elected. If the Canadian people don’t like it, they can lump it.”
Was there ever a prime minister as tough as Trudeau during the October Crisis of 1970? A prime minister as determined to bring about a constitutional revolution as Trudeau in 1981? One of the provincial premiers told Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall that Trudeau was “so diamond-hard he glittered” during the negotiations on constitutional renewal. These were not so much negotiations as ultimata, laid down by a prime minister determined to force Britain to amend Canada’s constitution against the wishes of eight provincial premiers, determined to declare unilateral independence if Britain baulked, determined to fulfil his promise to Quebeckers whether the province of Quebec liked it or not. Just watch him.
And then watch him come out of retirement to attack the entire political élite of the country when they agree to water down his constitution in the Meech Lake accord. Watch him come out of retirement again to condemn the second unanimous deal, the Charlottetown accord. By the 1990s he was fighting for his principles virtually without followers, as most of his party abandoned him to lust after renewed power.
In his heyday the Liberal Party’s image makers liked to play up Trudeau the gunslinger, jacket open, thumbs hooked in his belt, heading down Main Street for the showdown. His own favourite metaphor, splendidly displayed in his television memoirs, was solo canoeing, coming in from the wilderness, returning to it by himself. Cincinnatus, the saviour of Rome, had his plough; Pierre Trudeau, of Canada, his paddle.
Most politicians believe that the key to their art is compromise. When there are differences of opinion, conflicting interests, clashing personalities, the wise and successful leader is the one who finds a common denominator, brokers a deal, brings people together. Most students of Canadian politics would agree that brokerage has been central to the mainstream tradition. Macdonald, Laurier, and King were all great compromisers. They had to be, given the tremendous diversity of regional, religious, ethnic, and class interests that compose the stew of Canadian politics. If Macdonald made the Conservative Party a haven for any interest group with forty votes, Laurier read from his recipes, applied them to the Liberals, and haunted Mackenzie King with reminders of the need to conciliate Quebec, the West, and everyone else with a grievance.
Purists hated the apparent surrender of principle that seemed to accompany political success in Canada. How could Macdonald consort with the ultramontane papists in Quebec on Monday and the Loyal Orange Lodge on Tuesday? If “Waffly Willy” Laurier went to heaven, Henri Bourassa complained, he would immediately propose a compromise between God and Satan. To Frank Scott of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Mackenzie King would do nothing by halves that he could do by quarters. When Lester Pearson decided in 1963 to abandon the Liberal Party’s principled opposition to nuclear weapons for Canadian forces, one of his most outraged critics was Trudeau. “Power offered itself to Mr. Pearson,” Trudeau wrote in Cité libre. “He had nothing to lose except his honor. He lost it.”
The alternative approach to leadership, frequently advocated by New Democratic Party politicians and their predecessors, and to whom the young Trudeau seemed most sympathetic, was to cling to your principles, confront those who disagreed with you, and argue, persuade, claw, and fight your way to victory. If you lost at the power game, at least you went out with honour intact.
The trouble was that most Canadian politicians who took strong stands on issues of principle did lose. Not only J.S. Woodsworth and practically everyone else on the left but also their true-blue counterparts, ostensibly principled Tories like Arthur Meighen and R.B. Bennett. Trudeau did appear to stand in a kind of prime ministerial tradition as he shrugged instead of compromised, hammered the Front de Libération du Québec with the War Measures Act, rammed through patriation and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, hissed and mocked the media—and anyone else who got in his way. It was indeed the tradition of Meighen and Bennett, two of the least popular prime ministers in Canadian history. It was also the tradition of one remarkably successful contemporary Conservative politician, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher.
There is a way of challenging this conventional wisdom, a contrarian point of view.
Until his pathetic last days in office, when he, too, trumpeted the virtues of being unpopular, Brian Mulroney prided himself on having ousted Trudeau as the heir to Canada’s mainstream political tradition. An experienced mediator in industrial disputes, Mulroney saw himself as a skilled practitioner in the politics of creative compromise, particularly with the Meech Lake accord. The rhetoric of Meech was an endless litany of the necessity of compromise, of finding common ground, of remembering the tradeoffs of 1867, of scorning those whose principles would divide and rupture the nation. The first ministers who made Meech saw themselves as direct successors to the Fathers of Confederation. They were the statesmen of Re-confederation. Trudeau was the outsider, the spoiler, the fanatic.
But where exactly was the mainstream Canadian tradition as it poured into the muck of Meech Lake? Would Macdonald ever have conceded control of the Senate and the Supreme Court to the provinces? Would Laurier or King or St. Laurent ever have given special status to Quebec? Would the leader of the federal government at any previous time in Canadian history have made as many concessions for the sake of a deal as Mulroney did at Meech Lake? When the premiers of Manitoba and Ontario found themselves urging the prime minister to speak up for the national interest in the final Meech bargaining, it was clear that a mainstream tradition of resisting the power-hungry provinces had collapsed. In his desperation to make a deal at any cost, Mulroney had abandoned prime ministerial stewardship of the national interest.
The sense of a mainstream brokerage tradition in Canadian politics must not imply that prime ministers have never been firm or tough. Macdonald was at least as contemptuous of the provincial governments as Trudeau ever was, and usually acted accordingly. When respect for the rule of law was at stake, in the North-West Rebellion and the trial of Louis Riel, Macdonald could be rock solid. His perhaps apocryphal comment “Riel shall hang, though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour,” certainly bears comparison with Trudeau’s “Let them bleed” interview during the October Crisis. Laurier and St. Laurent, who governed Canada under very favourable circumstances, were perhaps never fully tested. Robert Borden, whose “unholy alliance” with Henri Bourassa and the Quebec nationalists in 1911 anticipated the partnership between Mulroney and Lucien Bouchard, rose to his duty in giving Canada Thatcher-like leadership during the conscription crisis of 1917–18. Even King, possibly the flabbiest of all prime ministers before Pearson, drew the line when Maurice Duplessis challenged Canada’s participation in the war against Hitler. Liberal legions intervened in a Quebec election to destroy their opponent, not deal with him. Even Pearson, whose desire to be liked sometimes had a frighteningly irresponsible dimension, could have a backbone on occasion, specifically after Charles de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” speech. The prime minister sent the president home.
Much of Trudeau’s toughness and unwillingness to compromise, at least at key moments in his career, was firmly in the mainstream of behaviour for Canadian prime ministers. As prime minister, you make a lot of compromises, but you are careful not to give away the shop. You always have a bottom line. You don’t surrender control of the federation to the provinces. You don’t let one province, Quebec, become a state within a state. You don’t allow the rule of law to be undermined. In familiar words, you stand on guard for Canada.
In this regard, the odd man out at Meech Lake and afterwards was not Trudeau. He stood firmly in the grand Canadian political tradition. Those who abandoned that tradition were the Conservatives Joe Clark and Mulroney. In hopes of forging alliances with provincial governments on the one hand and Quebec nationalists on the other, the Tories abandoned the notion of the supremacy of the government of Canada in the federal system and the constitutional equality of all Canadians.
From a reverse angle, it should not be forgotten that when he chose to, Trudeau could broker, buy off interests, and bribe voters with their own money as readily as most of his predecessors. No one has suggested, for example, that Trudeau’s personal spartanism had the slightest impact on the Ottawa circus he presided over. He made one or two good Senate appointments (out of several score), he had fewer sleazy personal friends than prime ministers before and since, and he seems intellectually to have begun to think about the limits of the Santa Claus state. Otherwise, in the Trudeau years, there was no fundamental change from Laurier or King’s day in the outpouring of Liberal patronage, campaign promises, or spending on public works. Or perhaps there was: arguably, the cynical use of taxpayers’ money to buy up regional, cultural, ethnic, and even gender interest groups may have reached a kind of apotheosis during the Trudeau years. The fact that bastard Keynesianism was everywhere in the ascendent and that no one seriously controlled government spending only lubricated the process.
Although they could never quite wean themselves from these practices, the Mulroney Tories at least recognized that the writing was on the wall. For all his sins, Mulroney did not leave office under the shadow of a last-minute orgy of cynical patronage appointments. Trudeau, like Sir Charles Tupper in 1896, did. He also left behind him the swimming pool at 24 Sussex Drive, donated by friends of the Liberal Party. If Mackenzie King had been a swimmer, he too might have appreciated such a favour. Robert Borden, I think, would have turned the pool down.
Canadian historian A.R.M. Lower once wrote a book entitled This Most Famous Stream, a meditation on the expansion of liberal democracy. A generation or two ago, before postmodern theory and the questioning of most traditional notions of “progress,” there was a commonly held view that the mainstream of the Canadian political tradition was one of expanding freedom. It was usually a Liberal view. Its heroes included the rebels of 1837 and those who fought for responsible government against the British and the Family Compact. After Confederation, Liberals were far more concerned with expanding the franchise and moving Canada towards democracy and independance than were anti-American, imperialist Tories like Macdonald.
King situated himself firmly in the great Liberal tradition, begun for Canada by his rebel grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie. With the achievement of universal suffrage and de facto Canadian independence by the early 1920s, advanced Liberalism concentrated on building a welfare state, of which King became the chief Canadian architect. Members of Pearson’s government saw themselves as further broadening that mainstream Canadian tradition with their introduction of the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada Assistance Plan, and national health insurance. In fact, all Canadian politicians had become social welfare democrats by the 1950s, with John Diefenbaker serving as the Progressive Conservative who brought his party into the century of the common man and woman.
The first Trudeau government planned to continue to broaden the social welfare tradition. It vastly liberalized access to unemployment insurance, tinkered with experiments in a guaranteed annual income, and saw regional development and equalization programs as the key to its thrust towards a “just society.” But by 1971 it was becoming clear that the state might have trouble financing existing welfare entitlements, let alone launching major new programs. The limits of welfare Liberalism were being reached.
Another major tradition in liberalism’s challenge to authority in the Western world had been an emphasis on expanding individual rights, especially vis-à-vis the state. Although Canadian Liberals, led by the social conservative St. Laurent, were not particularly eager champions of human rights during and after the war years, other politicians began to ride wavelets of interest. With his Canadian Bill of Rights, legislated federally in 1960, Diefenbaker caught what turned out to be a rising tide of human rights concerns all across Canada.
The rights of the individual were central to Trudeau’s early politics because he stood firmly in the old rouge tradition of having to fight for them in Quebec against the collectivist thrust of church-state hegemony. Trudeau’s early politics, like Laurier’s, revolved around the struggle to establish human rights and real democracy in Quebec. When, as prime minister of Canada, he began to be pushed on constitutional issues—somewhat against his will—he took up the idea of entrenching a bill or charter of rights to advance liberty across the whole country. In 1981–82 he won that struggle—his own determination clearly making the difference between success and failure—and became the father of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
By the 1990s the Charter, while still controversial, had become a revered Canadian institution. It was impossible to return to pre-Charter days, except, possibly, in a secessionist Quebec. The Canadian Charter was being studied around the world as a milestone in human rights legislation. Canada’s Constitution of 1982 had completed the long march to total independence, and its Charter, completing the transfer of power from the Crown to the people, was the first significant improvement Canadians had made on the political institutions they had inherited from Britain. It will probably be copied in the old motherland in the early years of the twenty-first century. Here, indeed, was the mainstream of modern human rights liberalism running broad and true.
Pierre Trudeau was undeniably more abrasive, arrogant, tough, aloof, solitary, and self-contained than traditional politicians in Canada or most other countries. Temperamentally, he began as an outsider and ended as one, most particularly in Quebec. But if he was not a back-slapper like Macdonald, a charmer like Laurier, a thoughtful fusser like King, or a diplomat like Pearson, neither was he an exotic European philosopher king, an inscrutable northern magus, or Cincinnatus in buckskin. He brought to the prime ministership intellectual skills, life experiences, and values different from those brought by most of his predecessors. Once in the office, however, he was not as unlike them as even his own ornery reflections imply. He brokered competing interests, bought political support, and doled out patronage in the grand Canadian manner. He stood firmly on guard for Canada when it was menaced. He greatly expanded the freedoms of Canadians. In these regards he was a true inheritor of the mantles of William Lyon Mackenzie, Sir John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Robert Borden, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson, even John Diefenbaker. Some maverick.