CHAPTER 12

Conclusion

The mud-slinging in Parliament, the turmoil in Quebec, and the chill in Canada’s relations with France did not markedly interfere with the great gala celebrations of the Centennial of Confederation. All across the country, and not least in Quebec, there were ceremonies and public events, speeches and parades to commemorate the survival of the country that the Fathers of Confederation had created a century before. Canada had survived; indeed, it had flourished and prospered despite depressions, two World Wars, a long Cold War, and the uncertainty and confusion engendered by continuous and often very bitter political and racial strife. Except for aberrations such as those of the Diefenbaker period, in the years since the Second World War the nation had made a good name for itself on the world stage, where Canada was genuinely honoured for its common sense and balanced views. At home the fertile land and the wealth of the country’s resources, coupled with the native intelligence and talent of the citizenry, had provided a good life for the great majority of the twenty million Canadians. There were still problems of distribution, great inequities between rich and poor and between provinces and regions; there probably always would be. But the provinces and their people now accepted the idea of equalization as a goal, the idea that the basic minimum standard of living should be the same wherever Canadians resided. That was a concept that had been unknown in 1867; it was one that was new just ten years before the centennial, and while some still quibbled, equalization was by 1967 an accepted part of Canadian life.

But 1967 was intended to be a year for celebration. Planning for the centennial had begun as early as 1958. As with so many of the best ideas of the Diefenbaker period, the initial thrust came from Alvin Hamilton, the Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources. A former high school teacher in Saskatchewan, Hamilton had asked for the views of his colleagues and officials on the best way to commemorate Canada’s first century, and in December he wrote to the Prime Minister to urge that the primary focus of the celebration should be historical with organizations of every sort being encouraged to revise and rewrite their histories. The object, he said, was to make 1967 “a year of personal significance and of national importance.”¹ This proposal was soon followed by letters to prominent academic historians. The minister told Donald Creighton of the University of Toronto, for example, “I believe that social history taught in our public and elementary schools for the last 25 years has certain limitations…social history, as one historical method has been exhausted for the time being at least.” What was needed? To Hamilton, it was clear: “…a series of historical monographs on the Fathers of Confederation.” And when he offered similar comments to the historian Hilda Neatby of the University of Saskatchewan, she replied that she was “in complete agreement…we need less exclusive attention to social history and more precise knowledge of the men and institutions that have formed and frame our national life.”²

Despite Hamilton’s proddings, the subsidization of a major series of biographies was not to be a feature of the centennial. What was to be done still remained unclear when the federal government in 1960 called a meeting of provincial representatives to get planning under way for 1967. John Archer, the Saskatchewan legislative librarian and provincial archivist, represented his province and reported to his premier that “there is simply no appreciation of the need for detailed planning, close executive control, and imaginative planning…. Questions on the provincial or community area of activity were met with such statements as – ‘But this is a Canadian Centennial – we are all Canadians’ while questions on the financial backing necessary for such projects as marking historic sites in provinces did not evoke a very ready answer…. I doubt many realize the conscious effort necessary to translate hopes into results.” Saskatchewan in 1955 had staged a tremendously successful fiftieth anniversary celebration of its achievement of provincial status, and Archer knew what he was talking about.³

At that initial federal-provincial meeting, the Quebec representatives had raised the possibility of a world’s fair in Montreal in 1967, and two years later Jean Drapeau, a mayor with a highly developed penchant for thinking big, won permission for his city to play host to a great exposition. Expo 67, as it came to be called, was a magnificent conception, but it was not without its problems in realization. In December 1963, for example, the project’s construction manager reported that the city’s share of the site preparation costs was escalating dramatically. The original estimates to prepare the islands in the St. Lawrence on which the fair was to be built had been $12 million. It was already evident that those costs would be at least $35 million; moreover, the city was building a grand subway ($30 million), contributing to the construction of an ice dam ($2 million) and to the costs of the World’s Fair Corporation ($25 million), and building expressways, roads, and other facilities ($50 million) to handle the expected flood of visitors. It was obvious, the manager said, that Montreal’s contribution was “out of all proportion when the benefits to be derived across Canada are considered.”⁴ Those benefits were expected to be substantial – the tax return on Expo 67 was estimated to be $230 million against a federal government cost of $148 million,⁵ and the Bank of Montreal had estimated that the enormous stimulus that the fair would provide to the Canadian economy would exceed that of the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the mega-project of the 1950s.⁶

There was much heart-burning among Drapeau’s critics in Montreal, who called for bread (and sewage-treatment plants in a city that poured its untreated ordure into the St. Lawrence) before circuses, and in the rest of the country over the costs that Ottawa had to assume to ensure that Expo 67 was ready on time. Part of this was the age-old feeling that the Liberals were catering to Quebec for political purposes; part was a nascent concern that the federal government was contributing massive sums to build the infrastructure of a Quebec that might soon be going its own way towards independence. But the results ultimately seemed to justify the costs. Expo 67 was an unqualified triumph, a superbly designed, brilliantly planned world’s fair that expressed the spirit of the new Quebec and Canada in a way that was completely winning. American reports positively gushed. Time greeted the fair’s opening with the observation that “its very existence is a symbol of the vigor and enthusiasm of the Canadians who conceived an impossible idea and made it come true,” while the Washington Post pontificated that “the Canadian, whose ego, individualism, and sense of personal worth, have long suffered in the shadow of the colossus to the south, will take a prideful look in the mirror and exclaim: ‘We did it.’ ”⁷ More important were the reactions of English-speaking Canadians to the Montreal many of them were seeing for the first time. “This city is the real, living end of it all,” one Toronto visitor said. “You have to give them credit. It’s not just Expo; they’re really living in Montreal. I wish I could find a job here.”⁸

It was true, too. Montreal’s great office towers and lavish shopping districts were one aspect of life; another was the general joie de vivre so apparent on its streets. With unemployment low, wages generally good, and a new spirit of confidence abroad in Quebec, there seemed every reason for optimism. If only that spirit in Quebec had not seemed so threatening to English-speaking Canadians…

If those Canadians were warily congratulating Montreal on the success of Expo, they were more happily heaping praise on themselves in an extraordinary variety of publicly and privately financed celebrations. There was the Centennial Train, a brilliantly conceived travelling museum with a train whistle that played the first few bars of “O Canada.” Where the train could not go, a caravan of tractor-trailers carried the same realistic recreation of a Great War trench, a Loyalist kitchen, and an eighteenth-century Quebec street.⁹ There were also birthday parties in hundreds of cities and towns from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver Island and from Point Pelee to Yellowknife, there were Centennial arenas, pools, and parks constructed by the score (to the value of $90 million), and hundreds of books were published with the aid of the federal government’s Centennial Committee, featuring its stylized maple leaf logo. There were, of course, the sombre assessments of editorial writers and the exuberant congratulatory appraisals of others.¹⁰ Above all, the hundredth birthday celebrations combined with Expo to give Canadians a sense of national pride, which was natural enough in the circumstances and healthy too, and the feeling quickly spread that the good, grey outlook that had long been said to characterize Canadians was gone forever. In its place, if the press of 1967 can be believed, was a swinging, with-it nation. Suddenly Canada was fun. The new and happy patriotism was a good sign in a country where nationalism, as the Canadian Press put it, “was always regarded as a foreign disorder.” So too was the simple fact that Bobby Gimby’s tune “Ca-na-da,” with its positively infectious melody, became almost inescapable: “Ca-na-da, we love you” seemed to say it all.

With the nation in this brief mood of exultation, political changes and problems should have seemed unimportant. They didn’t. De Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” interjection had aroused passions, and the Prime Minister’s virtual ordering of the French president out of the country seemed to many a suitable response. There had also been the Progressive Conservative party’s leadership convention at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto in September, and that galvanized public attention. To some, it was tragic to see the old Chief go down to humiliating defeat, his vaunted sense of timing having finally deserted him. To others, it was almost exhilarating to see Robert Stanfield, the Premier of Nova Scotia, win the leadership of the Tories. Stanfield was no fire-breathing orator on the Diefenbaker model, but he was a transparently decent and honourable man.

Still, the Liberals remained in power, even though opinion polls showed that the Conservatives under their new leader were making rapid gains. Prime Minister Pearson was seventy, his health was becoming precarious, and the government he led, all too obviously mirroring the uncertainties of the 1960s, racked with divisions and plagued by leaks and scandals, often seemed to be rudderless.¹¹ Even so, when Pearson finally told a press conference on December 14, 1967, that he was going to retire, there was a sense of loss. The Prime Minister had been a fixture on the Ottawa scene since the end of the 1920s as a bureaucrat, a senior official, a Cabinet minister, Leader of the Opposition, and chief executive; there was no one in public life with his experience – or with his self-deprecating humour and potent, guileful charm.

There were contenders aplenty for the throne, however. Early in 1966 Pearson had told at least three of his ministers – Paul Martin, the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Mitchell Sharp, the Minister of Finance, and Paul Hellyer, the Minister of National Defence – that he did not intend to stay in office much longer. “If I was in your shoes,” he told Hellyer, “I would begin talking to my friends.”¹² Indeed, for a time Pearson seemed to be leaning toward the Defence minister as his favoured successor, telling Walter Gordon in March 1966 that “of the present Cabinet he thought Hellyer might be the best but obviously,” Gordon added, “he has reservations.” In fact, Pearson’s comments on all his putative heirs were bleak: “He said Winters did not have the stuff,” Gordon wrote after a talk in June 1966, “that Martin would be hopeless; that he was disappointed in Sharp and his vanity; that he just couldn’t believe Hellyer was the man; and that while Allan MacEachen could be very good on occasion he could not be relied on.”¹³

Pearson’s views, while important, could not by themselves determine the leadership race. Once the candidates had been given the quiet nod to begin organizing, they leaped at the chance. Hellyer in particular was quick off the mark, setting up his shadow campaign team in 1966 and beginning to collect information on the sentiments of the party nabobs.¹⁴ Later in the year fund raising began, and by early 1967 Hellyer’s staff had prepared a budget for their sub rosa campaign before Pearson stepped down and a three-month post-resignation spending plan.¹⁵ Nor was Hellyer alone. Mitchell Sharp’s friends were also in the field, even beginning to talk informally with Hellyer’s and Martin’s people about convention deals.¹⁶ The External Affairs minister’s staff was equally busy,¹⁷ bolstered by the support of 29 per cent of those questioned in a Gallup poll who thought their man likely to be Pearson’s successor. Mitchell Sharp was next on the Gallup list, trailing badly at 13 per cent (even though Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist at the University of Toronto, pronounced his face perfect for television), Hellyer drew 11 per cent support, and John Turner, the young Registrar-General who would soon take the position of Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, 4 per cent.¹⁸

It was striking that there were no Quebec ministers on either Pearson’s list or the Gallup poll’s, a reflection of the perceived weakness of the rouge ranks in Ottawa. Jean Marchand, the Minister of Manpower and Immigration, was popular with some – Walter Gordon, for example, was urging him to run – but Marchand was properly dubious about his fluency in English and his temperament. Maurice Sauvé, the Minister of Forestry and Rural Development, thought of himself as a possibility, but few others did. And a third, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, the Minister of Justice, had been in Parliament only since the 1965 election and a minister only since April 1967; to many, he was simply too inexperienced to be given serious consideration for the top post. But to some Toronto professors and others, Trudeau was very much the right man for the times. Urged on by Marc Lalonde, one of Pearson’s principal aides and a long-time Trudeau friend, the academics organized a petition that circulated through universities across the country at the end of 1967 and the beginning of the new year urging Trudeau to run for the leadership. Their reasoning, one participant later remembered, was that the Justice minister was “straight” on the constitution.¹⁹

There was also the Liberal “principle” of alternating French- and English-speaking leaders. If that principle (the very existence of which many denied) held, it was a francophone’s turn, and Pearson for one told a friend a few days after his resignation statement that “he would favour a French Canadian (Marchand or Trudeau) at this time….”²⁰ The Quebec wing of the Liberal party was thinking along those lines too, Marchand himself telling a friend that “the Quebecers [sic] seem to think some French Canadian should be a candidate and that Trudeau’s (political) standing had improved & they might get behind him.”²¹

By February, the Trudeau boom was in full cry, astonishing testimony to the public’s desire for a fresh new face, no matter how untested its owner might be, and for relief from the acrimony that had characterized the political struggles between Pearson and Diefenbaker. The Justice minister’s strong performance at the Quebec and Ontario Liberal party conclaves and at the federal-provincial constitutional conference at the end of January and the beginning of February had drawn him forcefully to popular attention, and the media eagerly spread his name along with potted summaries of his hard, clear constitutional views to every corner of the land. On February 16, Trudeau declared himself a candidate.

Three days later the Liberal government was defeated in the House of Commons on a single clause of an income tax bill. Pearson had been in the south on holiday, and Mitchell Sharp and others, against the cautionary advice of the government House leader, had urged that the vote be taken. The defeat had come on a question of substance, and although the government survived, thanks to Pearson’s cajoling an inexperienced Stanfield, Sharp’s hopes for the leadership did not. The Minister of Finance offered his resignation, but Pearson, supremely disenchanted by the shambles his colleagues had made of his last days in office, grimly refused it.

By the time of the leadership convention at the beginning of April, the leading candidates were Trudeau, Hellyer, Martin, and Robert Winters, Sharp having thrown his support, now much shrunken, to Trudeau before the convention opened. Martin, a vigorous sixty-four years old, seemed an ancient compared to Trudeau’s forty-nine, and afterwards he lamented “the emergence of these young arrogant people. I did not know it existed. If I had known what I did three weeks before the Convention, I never would have gone into it – never in the world.”²² Winters, a self-proclaimed businessman-in-politics, had reentered public life and the Cabinet in 1965 because he believed the government needed a strong voice from the private sector. “I soon found out that in a cabinet of 26 or 27 the hard cold realities of business were not popular,” he said later.²³ They would not be popular with the majority at the convention, either. And Paul Hellyer, although four years younger than Trudeau, seemed to have come from an older and different political generation. The results, in retrospect, seemed predictable. Cheered on by an army of pretty mini-skirted workers, Trudeau led from the first, and on the fourth and final ballot he received 1,203 votes to 954 for Winters and 195 for John Turner, the one candidate who had refused to withdraw or to throw his support to anyone.

“The Liberal party couldn’t have afforded to deny Trudeau the leadership in the face of the public adulation he aroused,” a Cabinet minister told Peter Newman of the Toronto Star. “He was so patently what the public wanted….” And Newman himself, swept up like so many of the media gurus in the extraordinary fervour that the charismatic Trudeau aroused, was among those who proclaimed that “the choice of Trudeau represents a unique opportunity for the revival of the Expo spirit that did so much for the Canadian psyche…. Trudeau,” he wrote on April 8, the Monday after the convention, “could be the agent of a revival of Canadian political values, the end of the alienation that has removed most of the young generation from active involvement in our political process.” For a time, that judgement seemed possible and even correct. More to the point, as a senior public servant wrote to a colleague overseas, the new prime minister and Liberal leader “at least knows what he stands for, and I really think it will be good for all concerned to have a first class French Canadian in charge again.” Clearly Trudeau was not a man troubled by uncertainty; he knew precisely where he stood, particularly on constitutional questions, and that his intellect was first class no one could question. But his selection was a risk for the country and the Liberal party all the same, and one insider noted that no one knew what the new prime minister would do.²⁴ That was the truest judgement of all, but in April 1968, in the euphoria left by the Liberal convention, all the possibilities were open, and Canada seemed a changed country from what it had been only a few days before. A new era, the Trudeau era, had begun, destroying all prospects that Robert Stanfield might be the leader for the 1970s, and the doubts and hesitations that had dominated the nation since 1957 seemed to have been swept away in a splendid surge of optimism. In their place was a new decisiveness and leadership. Or so many Canadians believed.