BOB RAE
Bob Rae is partner at the Canadian international law firm of Goodman Phillips & Vineberg. His Canadian clients have included companies, trade unions, charitable and nongovernmental organizations, and governments themselves. Rae served as premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, and was elected eight times to federal and provincial parliaments before his retirement from politics in 1996. He led the New Democratic Party of Ontario from 1982 to 1996, and served as leader of the official opposition before becoming premier. He was also the federal NDP finance critic from 1978–1982. He is the author of From Protest to Power and The Three Questions: Prosperity and the Public Good, due out in the fall of 1998.
ISAIAH BERLIN recalls the old fable, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” and reminds us that: “there exists a great schism between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single centered vision … and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory” (The Proper Study of Mankind, 1997). If we apply this moral to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, we see that his greatest strength has also been his greatest weakness. His political life centred on “one big thing”—the demolition of Quebec nationalism. This fixity became his greatest strength, for, like many others, his talents and invective were always put to best use when he was in his “J’accuse” mode. But it was also his greatest weakness, for he became the prisoner of his own rhetoric, an ideologue despite himself, and curiously rigid as he attacked anyone who chose to disagree.
Like many in my generation, I have not been consistent in my own assessment of Trudeau. As an undergraduate in the 1960s I was an early supporter. My enthusiasm soon faded, however, and, after his election in 1968, I wrote that he was sounding more and more like “William Lyon Mackenzie King in a mini-skirt.” I was a strong critic of his approach to the economy in my time as finance spokesman of the New Democratic Party, and an equally fervent ally on patriation of the Constitution. We parted company over thr Meech and Charlottetown aaccords, but agreed on free trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement. At a personal level, we have never exchanged more than a few words in private and the usual range of partisan barbs in public.
It is somewhat ironic that a man who led the governing party of Canada for more than sixteen years, and whose span as prime minister was only slightly shorter, would portray himself in his last book as paddling constantly “against the current.” From another perspective, his life seems downstream with a full wind behind him all the way. His perspective speaks to the importance of his formative years in opposition and the power of his self-image as the lonely world citizen fighting the forces of reaction all around him.
One of the mythologies popularized by the English-language media in the late 1960s was that Trudeau sprang fully grown as a “new politician,” with no baggage from the bad old days. In the cult of the new and the young so prevalent at the time, English Canadians embraced Trudeau as the man without a past, someone of apparently pure intellect who, by his presence alone, aroused emotional mania. That the professor would become a brilliant stump politician, even a demagogue, was a discovery reserved for later years.
In fact, Trudeau was an “opposition leader” for the first fifteen years of his career. A teacher, journalist, and commentator, what he said and wrote between 1950 and 1965 was a reflection of his political engagement against Maurice Duplessis and the Quebec nationalist establishment of his day. He developed a style that never left him. Lucid, unequivocal, brilliant, acerbic, he revelled in the tricks and excesses of rhetorical debate. It is impossible to read his work of those days without admiring his skill and the verve of his argument. Yet the perpetual undergraduate quality of a man infatuated with his own cleverness grates as well. More than anything else, he wanted to win the argument.
Trudeau’s first argument, that the Duplessis political order was corrupt and archaic, was right then, as it is now. His support for the essential elements of a democratic civil society was eloquent and unequivocal. He showed courage and dedication in his support for trade unions in a deeply conservative and repressive political context. His treatment of nationalism in all its manifestations is much more problematic and would lead to even bigger difficulties in the years ahead.
Trudeau was a member of a broad coalition of forces caught up in the struggle against the Duplessis government and its allies. A government that appeared so reactionary and corrupt produced an opposition that covered a wide spectrum of views. Many of the members of the Quiet Revolution were, as we now know, as firmly nationalistic as any of Duplessis’ friends. Indeed, soon after the formation of the government of Jean Lesage in 1960, Trudeau was already proving to be a strong critic of what he saw as the perpetuation of Quebec’s nationalist myth. He broke with René Lévesque initially on the subject of hydroelectric nationalization, about which he remained a strong sceptic.
Trudeau’s political voice found an strong and clear expression in these opposition years. His description of Quebec’s history and political culture in the opening chapters of The Asbestos Strike, its tirades on the “treason of the intellectuals,” its broadsides against corruption and what he saw as a weak and vacillating parliamentary opposition, remain classics of liberal democratic writing in modern Canada. Clever, scathing, and funny, they reflect the enthusiasm of the battle and the joy of argument itself. There is no question that, to be at his best, Trudeau needed an enemy, and he was never stronger or clearer or more effective than when eviscerating an opponent. It was this spirit that always gave life to his political personality. When he lacked an enemy or a clear sense of purpose or direction, which was clearly the case between 1968 and 1972, and again during the “phony war” with the separatists in the late 1970s, Trudeau reverted to a language that was at once technocratic, remote, and aloof. It spoke to the conservative side of his personality, and the often cautious nature of his actions.
Trudeau’s need for something to oppose also meant that, on occasion, he seemed to be synthesizing his enemies, making them sound more evil than they could possibly be. Trudeau is not the first politician to create a series of straw arguments and fabricated opponents to make himself look good. It is yet another irony of his life that the man of reason, of cool intellect, as he liked to think of himself, was in fact a politician who was never afraid to play on emotion and who, in key political arguments, reverted to demagoguery of the simplest kind.
Like all great men, Trudeau is hard to characterize. In attempting to bring him down to size and to dismiss him as “nothing but a conservative” or “nothing but a socialist” or “nothing but a sellout,” his fiercest opponents on the left or the right, or from Quebec’s nationalist community often missed the point. It was Trudeau himself who liked to quote the famous aphorism that “the style is the man himself.” That is entirely true. No assessment of Trudeau that tries to pigeonhole him, or to explain his resonance, his extraordinary political success, and his longevity in a simple phrase, is worth very much if it is based on some ideological standard. Trudeau is without question the most successful political figure in Canada since the Second World War, and his influence continues to affect the efforts of his successors.
Trudeau’s first brush with the federal Liberal Party was hardly a friendly one. He launched a vitriolic attack on Lester Pearson for his Scarborough speech of 1963, the speech where Pearson finally recognized the futility of John Diefenbaker’s Bomarc policy and the risk to the Canada–US relationship posed by the contradictions of the Conservatives’ attitudes to defence. There was neither generosity nor balance in Trudeau’s assault on Pearson. It had the kind of undergraduate quality that always marked his diatribes at their worst: personal, unfair, never allowing for a moment the possibility that someone of integrity might take a different view. It says a great deal for Pearson’s own generosity that he quickly overlooked this outburst in appointing Trudeau as his parliamentary secretary in 1965 and, two years later, as attorney general and minister of justice. Trudeau’s ministerial career was marked by the landmark legislation that allowed for a liberal reform of the Criminal Code. It suited Trudeau’s temperament and policy directions perfectly. The reforms on abortion and homosexuality, while controversial at the time and offensive to certain conservative sensibilities, permitted Trudeau to express some fundamental thoughts on privacy and the distinction between private moral judgment and criminal activity. They were humane and necessary.
Trudeau’s role as constitutional adviser to Pearson pointed to a shift in Liberal policy that was to be consolidated after Trudeau himself became prime minister in 1968. Pearson’s vision of cooperative federalism clearly allowed for some recognition of the emerging and progressive nationalism marked by the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. With the appointment of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and the compromises reached over the Canada Assistance Plan and the Canada Pension Plan, Canada’s duality and partial asymmetry were quietly being accepted and recognized. Lesage’s defeat and replacement by a more determined nationalist in Daniel Johnson, together with Pearson’s personal outrage at General Charles de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” speech in the summer of 1967, gave rise to support for the very different approach advocated by Trudeau. A language of rights, a strengthened francophone presence within the federal government, and a determination to ensure an unequivocal role for Ottawa, along with a loathing of anything that smacked of “special status” for Quebec, would become the hallmarks of Trudeau’s approach to federal/provincial relations. Lines that Pearson had preferred to leave somewhat unclear, in the name of diplomatic solutions, were suddenly drawn in the sand. The language of partnership that appeared to be emerging between Premiers John Robarts of Ontario and Daniel Johnson of Quebec was replaced by an unambiguous assertion of a determinedly symmetrical federalism, in which the powers of all the provinces would be recognized only to the extent that a “strict construction” of the Constitution would allow.
Many previous prime ministers had wanted to patriate the Constitution, but none was so ideologically committed as Trudeau to patriation accompanied by a Charter of Rights as an assertion of constitutional maturity and citizenship. Trudeau’s first efforts in constitutional reform culminated, after long negotiating sessions with the premiers, in the Victoria Charter in 1971. When Quebec premier Robert Bourassa reneged on the agreement, Trudeau never quite trusted him again. This perception, together with Bourassa’s indecision in the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte in October 1970, fuelled the breach between Trudeau and subsequent Quebec Liberal governments.
There is no question that it was during the October Crisis in 1970 that Canadians saw for the first time Trudeau’s new dimension as a defender of authority. He was not afraid to be ruthless in the circumstances and had little time for those in opposition who expressed doubts, reservations, and even hostility to the first use of emergency powers in modern Canada in peacetime. It became a defining moment in understanding the extent to which Trudeau was prepared to use the powers of the state to deal with criminal activity that was quickly elevated to “apprehended insurrection.” Many could never forgive Trudeau for what they saw as an abuse of power. But, at the same time, he clearly lost all patience with those critics who, in his view, were not prepared to deal with the realities of modern political terrorism. The disillusionment was deep, and it was mutual.
While many in the progressive movement were less than impressed with the technocratic Trudeau after 1968, the War Measures Act produced a split of a qualitatively different kind—more severe, more harsh, more personal. It was at that moment that Trudeau made his spectacularly cool assessment of Claude Ryan, publisher of the respected Quebec newspaper Le Devoir, which had dared to criticize him: “absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.” Many New Democrats regard the party’s lonely battle against the War Measures Act as its most unpopular but most necessary fight. Clearly, Trudeau had aroused public opinion to a point of near unanimity in his favour, but it was also the moment that showed his demagogic side. The debate over the apprehended insurrection will never be closed, but one point is clear: once Bourassa asked the Trudeau government to act, it moved without hesitation. Critics were relegated to the ranks of hand-wringing “nervous Nellies.”
It is ironic that, in the 1980 referendum, Trudeau’s love of doing battle and winning led him to fight René Lévesque on his own ground. Now, eighteen years after that first referendum, the federal government is finally considering the possibilities of secession, which should surely have been expressed unambiguously when the first referendum was debated. No doubt Trudeau was overwhelmingly confident that he could win the issue while fighting on the intellectual terrain defined by his opponents. Yet there is no question that the task of future governments was made more difficult by his acceptance of the premises of the first referendum. This is a curious inconsistency in what is otherwise a root-and-branch questioning of the premises of Quebec nationalism.
Yet another irony is the fact that the man many describe as an unbending ideologue was forced by the Supreme Court ruling of 1981 to introduce the “notwithstanding clause” to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. On many subsequent occasions, Trudeau expressed profound regret that this compromise was necessary, and he attacked the Supreme Court majority in a speech at the University of Toronto in 1991.
No doubt it was his lingering resentment at the compromise forced upon him that explains Trudeau’s venom over the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. It was not simply that he found fault with the substance of the Supreme Court judgment of 1981 and the particular clauses in the accords. Rather, it was his sense that his opponents were either charlatans or dunces, or both. No argument was too low or too personal. Brian Mulroney was a “sly fox” and a weakling; Quebec supporters of Meech were “snivellers”; the premiers were all “cowards.” There was no end to the number of straw men he was prepared to drag across the theatre of ridicule. He spoke for a constituency truly bewildering in its breadth: charter centralizers who saw any reference to provincial rights as an assault on the welfare state; “one Canada” supporters who, like Diefenbaker before them, preferred the unambiguous assertion of unity to a world of mixed identities and dual loyalties; and nativists who saw Trudeau as the best hammer with which to bash French Canada. This coalition of American style constitutionalists, unreconstructed Fabians, and incipient western reformers proved to be an unbeatable combination. A know-nothing populism had as its main spokesman the most articulate symbol of “reason over passion.”
What Trudeau was never prepared to admit was that it was the concession on the notwithstanding clause that gave more powers to Quebec than anything proposed in either the Meech or Charlettown accords. Further, it was his own fiscal policies over sixteen years which did more to decentralize and limit the power of the central government than anything proposed in either document. Subsequent Liberal governments will end up conceding and admitting to the basic premises contained in Meech and Charlettown, with the appropriate refinements that time and further discussion will produce. The street fighter could win against his opponents, who were all “losers” and “nobodies” in any event. But he will not win the battle because, in all his rhetoric, he failed to recognize that further constitutional reform is required, that the purpose of patriation was not to freeze the Constitution for all time but to make it our own to allow for future change. In that sense, Trudeau’s lack of generosity to his successors reflects a churlishness that hardly does him proud. But he would not be himself were he not churlish as well as brilliant, emotional as well as rational, conservative as well as radical. “Do I contradict myself?” he asked. “Very well, then, I contradict myself.”
Is an accommodation with Quebec nationalism possible within the Canadian federation, or is it a delusion to think that some middle ground exists between Trudeau’s awful symmetry and separation? Trudeau’s political life was based on the simple notion that French Canadians should seek their full expression of citizenship in Canada itself, not in Quebec. Patriation, the Charter, minority language rights, official bilingualism, opposition to Meech and Charlottetown were all manifestations of this “one big thing.”
Yet the previous great prime ministers—John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, Mackenzie King, Louis St. Laurent, and Lester Pearson—would have seen Meech and Charlottetown as worthy successors to their efforts at accommodation and compromise. It’s all very well to mock the accords, as Trudeau did, as a “dog’s breakfast.” So was the British North America Act itself. Constitutions do not emerge perfectly formed from the brains of the philosopher kings, as Trudeau himself discovered in 1980 and 1981. They are always messy processes that are easier to knock down or tear apart than they are to construct. Macdonald knew that Quebec nationalism was not about to disappear, which is why he, together with the key leadership of Upper Canada, ditched Lord Durham’s impossible effort to create “one Canada.” His key successors reached the same conclusion, knowing that Canada’s duality is not its only characteristic, but it is certainly one of them. They learned from Macdonald’s famous dictum: “Treat them as a nation and they will act as people generally do—generously. Call them a faction and they become factions.” Trudeau never did learn this truth.
Trudeau’s hostility to Duplessis, along with the strength of his own liberal ideology, puts him in the camp of those who see all manifestations of nationalism as a retrograde craving that progress, culture, and enlightenment will make redundant. To use another phrase often quoted by Isaiah Berlin, Trudeau never absorbed the wisdom of Kant’s maxim: “From the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight is ever made.”
In its excesses, Quebec nationalism can be as offensive as any; but it cannot be understood only by its excesses. The need to belong to a family and a community, to treasure a language and a native tongue, to value a land because it is home and nurtures common values and traditions: These are not signs of civil or weakness or a crass perversion of human ideals. Durham’s vision of a culturally inferior French population disappearing in the wake of a technologically advanced English “civilization” proved to be quite wrong, precisely because of the depth of nationalist feeling in Quebec and the fact that 1867 reserved significant powers for the provinces.
This is not to say that Trudeau was wrong in his assault on the premises of René Lévesque and Lucien Bouchard. Rather, in his taste for winning the argument pure and simple, Trudeau failed to seek the middle ground. At its best, political life is not a debating society; it is about finding a better balance.
Looking back now we can see more clearly than ever how much the world, and Canada, has changed since the start of Trudeau’s tenure. Canada is less a national economy than a group of regional economies increasingly faced with global integration. We have gone from the late industrial to the information age; from a time of steady growth and low debts to an era of low growth, high debts, and greater disparities between rich and poor. Some of these changes Trudeau resisted; some he contributed to. It would be a stretch to say that he really understood them: few modern liberal democratic leaders have shown such fitful attention to the economy. Knowing only one big thing has its price: we got our patriated Constitution in 1981, but it came at some cost. The “Canadian crisis” identified by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1965 was not resolved, but continued in another form.
Constitutional scholar Frank Scott attacked Mackenzie King because he “blunted us … never doing by halves what could be done by quarters.” Trudeau did not blunt us. He amused us, inspired us, enraged us, enlightened us, disappointed us, and, ultimately, eluded us.