CHAPTER 7

EVE OF THE REVOLUTION

The 1949 Asbestos Strike in the Eastern Townships was a decisive moment in the history of Quebec—and in the life of Pierre Trudeau. The strike actually defined Trudeau more than it changed the province. The victory of the Catholic unions, which was achieved through negotiation, was surprising, but it proved difficult to build upon. The Duplessis regime did not crumble, and the Catholic Church retained its dominance. Trudeau quickly discovered that he could not get a position at the Université de Montréal, but he at least had independence—the product of his inheritance and his own will. He remained determined to learn from the experience of the strike.

The international unions had strongly supported the strike and sought to take advantage of it. Some of the strike leaders, including Gérard Pelletier, Jean Marchand, and Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) activists, decided that a book should be written to describe the diverse experiences of the strikers, their clerical and intellectual supporters, and the labour unions—which, for the first time, had shown exceptional resolve in confronting the Duplessis government and the multinational companies connected with the mines. Two years later, Recherches sociales, a group funded by the Canadian Labour Congress to strengthen socialist sentiment among francophones, commissioned a book that would analyze how the strike represented “a turning point in the social history of Quebec” and “inform the general public of the cruel or reassuring lessons we had learned.”¹ F.R. Scott, the McGill law professor and socialist activist, was the director of the project, with Gérard Pelletier as editor. When Pelletier’s schedule became too busy, his Cité libre co-editor, Pierre Trudeau, took on the task. Trudeau had not edited a book before, nor had he ever written a sustained analytical essay of the type needed here for the introduction and the conclusion. The project had significant potential—but would prove a challenge.

Trudeau was now thirty-two years old and arbitrating labour disputes, researching the brief for the Féderation des unions industrielles du Québec (FUIQ) for the Tremblay Commission on Federal-Provincial Relations, writing articles for Cité libre and various newspapers, teaching courses for little or no money to workers during the summer, and, of course, travelling.^* Most of the authors who had agreed to write the other articles for the book on the Asbestos Strike worked closely with the labour movement: Maurice Sauvé was the technical adviser for the Canadian and Catholic Confederation of Labour (CCCL); Pelletier edited Le Travail for the CCCL and was its director of public relations; Jean Gérin-Lajoie worked for the United Steel Workers; and Charles Lussier, like Trudeau, practised labour law. Other authors included Father Gérard Dion of Laval University, the editor of Relations industrielles; Réginald Boisvert, a television writer who specialized in working-class dramas; and the brilliant young Laval sociologist Fernand Dumont, who agreed to explore the historical forces that “prepared the scene for the Asbestos Strike.”² F.R. Scott would write the foreword. A disciplined worker, Scott soon despaired as the editor and the authors continually missed their deadlines.³ There was additional delay as Trudeau tried, unsuccessfully—and with the help of author Anne Hébert, on whom he had an unrequited “crush”—to find a French publisher in the fall of 1955. To his chagrin, he discovered there was little interest in contemporary Quebec in Paris.⁴

Progress on the book was further delayed when Trudeau departed for Europe in the winter of 1955–56, but he tried, with the assistance of Laval political scientist Jean-Charles Falardeau, to stitch the volume together while he was away. Still manuscripts did not arrive, and promises went unkept. Falardeau himself apologized abjectly just before Christmas: “I repeat to you, Pierre, that I understand, that Frank [Scott] understands, that Gérard [Pelletier] understands your impatience, [we understand] even the disgust of which you spoke some time ago. You accepted, and you fulfilled your responsibility, to edit this volume to completion, you carried out these chores briskly and, with good reason, you already had enough of it in the summer.” Falardeau was astonished that Trudeau “in these circumstances and despite all, remained so patient.” When something mattered, however, Trudeau could be patient indeed.⁵

Finally, in 1956, a complete text came together, and the Cité libre press became the publisher. Trudeau wrote two major essays for the book: a long introduction describing the social, economic, and cultural context of the strike, and an epilogue reflecting on the effects of the strike and on developments in Quebec after 1949. Polemical, angry, eloquent, these essays remain his finest analytical writing.

Through the prism of the Asbestos Strike, he illuminated the calamity of Quebec in the twentieth century, a time of “servile and stupefied silence” in which the social doctrine of the Catholic Church was “invoked in support of authoritarianism and xenophobia” until, in Asbestos in 1949, “the worm-eaten remnants of a bygone age” finally came apart.⁶ The many drafts among his personal papers and the delays confirm that Trudeau chose these and other inflammatory words and sentences carefully. What separates these essays from other of his writings is their detailed research, especially on the economic history of Quebec, and the extensive presentation of facts in support of his arguments. In social scientific terms, he sought to rearrange the “facts” of Quebec’s historical experience and then establish new norms for behaviour in that society. Although nearly all the arguments had already appeared in Trudeau’s earlier writings, they are presented here more clearly and consistently in a brilliant attempt to convince “a whole generation, [which] hesitates on the brink of commitment,” to smash old totems and “examine the rich alternatives offered by the future.”⁷

Trudeau organized his introduction meticulously, beginning with the “facts,” followed by the “ideas,” and then the “institutions.” The facts established that Quebec had benefited from industrialization and modernization, although the riches had not flowed as bounteously to the francophone population as to others because “we fought [modernization] body and soul.” Ideas had mattered: “In Quebec … during the first half of the twentieth century, our social thinking was so idealistic … so divorced from reality … that it was hardly ever able to find expression in living and dynamic institutions.” Nationalism became a system of defence that “put a premium on all the contrary forces” to progress: “the French language, Catholicism, authoritarianism, idealism, rural life, and later a return to the land.” At a time when French Canadians confronted a materialistic, commercial, and increasingly democratic North America, nationalism became a “system of thought” that rejected “the present in favour of an imagined past.”⁸

The institutions of a modern state were either stunted or stillborn in Quebec, he argued, principally because of the predominance of the Roman Catholic Church, with its conservative and nationalist doctrine. Labour unions were feeble, the press servile, and political parties corrupt. The fault lay with the leaders, not the people, because the church had never encouraged the political education of the masses. Votes were sold on election day for a bottle of whisky by citizens who spoke righteously after Mass on Sunday about the common good of society. Yet these same leaders simply “rejected any political action likely to result in economic reforms” because “liberal economic reforms were proposed by the ‘English’” and “socialist reforms by ‘materialists.’” Instead, they pursued quixotic dreams of a return to the land and of corporatism, an economic philosophy “which had the advantage of not requiring any critical reflection.” Church and state combined to exclude or condemn those who challenged this consensus, whether they be Communists, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the left, or the English. The universities, under the heavy hand of the clergy, also avoided not only critical reflection but also modern technology and social science. In these collective failures lay the importance of the Asbestos Strike, which “assumed the proportions of a social upheaval.”⁹

Trudeau went on to make scathing attacks on the principal exponents of nationalism and Catholic social doctrine in Quebec. He condemned the Jesuit scholar Father Richard Arès and the Montreal economist Esdras Minville as ignorant of both modern social science and the contemporary world itself. He linked Abbé Groulx with authoritarianism and xenophobia. He accused André Laurendeau of fearing any social reform initiated by the federal government because of the threat it represented to “Catholic morality” and the dreams of corporatism, in which individualism would disappear and elites would be organized to manage society. He criticized the conservative and nationalist economist François-Albert Angers for his support of corporatism, his opposition to state action, and his condemnation of socialism. He attacked various church leaders for their opposition to socialism and the CCF, including Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, even though he admitted that Lévesque had recently demonstrated more liberal ways as the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval. And he even condemned his earlier friend and mentor François Hertel for a 1945 essay that spoke wistfully of the need for corporatism.¹⁰

Although Maurice Duplessis remained the main target, few escaped Trudeau’s relentless attack. Paul Gouin, Thérèse’s uncle, merited praise for creating the Action libérale nationale in the 1930s, but he was also criticized for his alliance with Duplessis. The exile of Bishop Charbonneau to Victoria became a symbol of the oppressiveness of the church and its antipathy to free speech. Grudgingly, Trudeau gave credit to the church for its efforts in charitable associations, welfare organizations, and adoption agencies, but, in truth, he concluded, the church’s “heart and mind were certainly not in it, but longed for the golden age when an obscure rural people was accustomed to hide behind the skirts of the clergy.”¹¹ Not surprisingly, Jean-Charles Falardeau and Frank Scott worried about the impact Trudeau’s comments on these individuals would have.^*

The essay is an incisive, often bitter, social and political analysis that defines Trudeau’s beliefs more sharply than ever before. It sets out the outline for what he would later term the “just society,” one in which legal protections assure democratic participation in the development of public policy. He was firmly anti-nationalist—not simply an opponent of conservative Quebec nationalism but wary of a doctrine that closed borders to ideas, people, and goods. Because of the church’s link with conservative nationalism in Quebec and its opposition to “progress,” he believed it should retreat from the socioeconomic realm and occupy only the spiritual heights, where its presence was fully justified.

Here Trudeau was very much a “modernizer,” one who believed that material needs were important in a democratic society and that contemporary social science and Keynesian economics were essential to the creation of the “good life.” He was also a socialist cast in a British-Canadian mould. The essay treated the CCF as a great opportunity lost. Despite later claims that Trudeau was never a party person, this piece made it clear that the CCF closely reflected his views, just as the receipts for CCF dues for 1955 in his papers prove his participation in CCF campaigns.^* Indeed, at a conference sponsored by Le Devoir in February 1955, Trudeau—in elegant suit and tie, with pocket handkerchief perfectly placed—scandalized his listeners by strongly urging socialism for Quebec. “M. Elliot-Trudeau,” as the newspaper wrongly named him, “reproached Le Devoir for having no philosophy of economics. A kind of schizophrenia,” he declared, “exists among the editors of Le Devoir on these questions.”¹²

Like many of its leaders, Trudeau thought that the best hope for the future of the CCF lay in the trade-union movement, whose earlier gains in the forties had not been built on during the Cold War fifties. He rejected the “proletarian messianism” of the Communist left, but he saw alternatives in the democratic socialism of Western Europe. He ended his epilogue to the book: “The only powerful medium of renewal is industrialization; we are also aware that this medium will not provide us with liberty and justice unless it is subject to the forces of an enlightened and powerful trade-union movement.” Finally, Trudeau looked beyond the Quebec border with a generous description of North America and English Canada. Quebec, he argued, could not stop the world and seal itself off, just as “nationalistic countries like Spain, Mexico, Argentina, etc. have learned that bloody revolution eventually topples archaic structures.” Fortunately, “we,” the French Catholic people of Quebec, “have a safety-valve in a continental economy and in a federal constitution, where pragmatism, secularism, and an awareness of change are the predominant attitudes.”¹³ For the first time, Trudeau had clearly defined the value of Canada for himself and for his province.

Beneath the clarity of the vision, beyond the rhetoric of debate and the flow of statistical evidence, Trudeau’s essays expressed a deep-seated anger. Not surprisingly, they generated anger in return, and they continue to do so as modern historians reassess the dramatic events of the fifties and sixties in Quebec. At the time, François-Albert Angers devoted six essays in L’Action nationale to Trudeau’s attacks on nationalism and his promotion of socialism, fearing it would lead to homogeneity with English Canada. More troubling to Trudeau was the response of Father Jacques Cousineau, a highly respected Jesuit who had mediated the strike in 1949 and was considered a supporter of the rights of unions and workers. The priest pointed to the role of the Catholic-affiliated unions in the strike and the activity of some important elements of the church in its mediation and resolution—all of which Trudeau had ignored. It was a just criticism, but Cousineau went too far in claiming that Trudeau simply reflected the views of the CCF and its Quebec branch, the Parti social démocratique (PSD). Father Richard Arès, the editor of the Jesuits’ Relations, refused to publish Trudeau’s reply to Father Cousineau or even a letter to the editor from him. If Trudeau was disappointed, he was not surprised by his former Jesuit mentors’ disavowal of their prize student.

Trudeau expected the neo-nationalist André Laurendeau—whom he had met in the thirties, fought with in the forties against conscription and Canadian war policy, and debated in journals and on television in the fifties—to attack him in Le Devoir for his views. Laurendeau did, but indulgently. While agreeing that the conservative nationalism of the Duplessis government and the social thought of the church created a barrier to social reform and essential change, he argued that Trudeau oversimplified and ignored the genuine challenges to the survival of a French-speaking people in a modern North America. Nevertheless, he deemed the essay a brilliant and evocative ode to liberty: in its argument, ideas, and prose, it presented “a remarkable personality” to Quebec public life.¹⁴ Still, Laurendeau rebuked his colleague for his anger and for his personal attacks on those who had fought the same battles and endured similar blows. At the very least, he said, Trudeau was rude, especially to many of his early mentors and teachers.

If Trudeau’s essays on the Asbestos Strike are significant for the intellectual history of Quebec, they are fundamentally important in his own intellectual biography. In them we sense that Trudeau, the student who fiercely cherished his individuality, the adolescent who chafed against authority, and the young lover who dreamed of a haven from the deadened hand of Catholic morality, believes he has finally broken free. His own past has become another country, one he has largely abandoned and whose monuments he no longer honours. Those long nights and days at Brébeuf College where he pored over the texts of Abbé Groulx, French religious philosophers, and assorted papal encyclicals now seemed like wasted time. His interpretation of historical change focused in quasi-Marxist terms on economic forces, rejecting the role of social thought that, in Quebec, did not reflect reality.¹⁵ Like many of his colleagues on Cité libre, he dismissed his early studies as useless, unrelated to the real life of workers or the contemporary needs of Quebec.^*

The passionately idealistic yet traditional anti-Communist Catholic youth who had demonstrated against André Malraux, supported Marshal Pétain, and possibly thrown stones through Jewish shop windows had, by his early thirties, become a socialist who used Marxist dialectics to understand economic change and now notoriously claimed that priests had no more divine right than prime ministers or anyone else. Just over a decade earlier, Trudeau had vigorously supported the nationalist Bloc populaire canadien, had funded the conservative nationalist Notre Temps, and had even had nationalists muse about him leading an independence movement. In the mid-forties, François Hertel was his close companion, Catholic and nationalist thought a preoccupation, and Abbé Groulx an admired counsel. Now, in the mid-fifties, he had begun to form his own independent opinions and to break from his roots: he chided his mentor Hertel, attacked his friend Father Richard Arès, and derided François-Albert Angers, who had supported him against Father Braun after his trip to the Soviet Union.

Trudeau’s time in Ottawa had bred a strong resentment against the second-class status of French-speaking Canadians within the Canadian public service. The fifties in Montreal now provided him with a practical education that made him a bitter opponent of the conservative and nationalist government of Duplessis and a resentful critic of the church that tried to silence him and his colleagues. And, through Frank Scott, the CCF, the Canadian labour movement, and his participation in the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (through which he attended two international conferences in Africa and in Asia), Trudeau would increasingly develop relationships with English Canadians who had considerable respect for his credentials from Harvard and the London School of Economics.¹⁶ With his effortless and often eloquent English and his liking for foreign travel, he was sought out for conferences and media appearances in English Canada. His striking appearance, whimsical yet elegant taste in clothes, and unpredictability of views made him a well-known figure in Montreal cultural and intellectual circles, and television carried his name and views to a broader audience. While some of his previous characteristics changed significantly in this decade, others remained constant. He was still elusive, a mystery to those around him. And he continued to pursue his ambition for public life, even if its object was not yet clear.

The Asbestos Strike [La Grève de 1’amiante] appeared in the fateful fall of 1956, when Britain, France, and Israel conspired to attack Egypt and brought the world to the brink of war. Soviet troops, meanwhile, crushed the Hungarian uprising, exposing the brutal disregard of democratic and individual rights within the Communist bloc. In France and elsewhere, Communist intellectuals were abandoning the Communist Party, but they remained disillusioned with the West because of the conspiracy among the French, British, and Israeli governments to smash Arab nationalism. By 1957 the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, which was clinging desperately to great-power status, had tested hydrogen bombs that had the capacity to destroy humanity in minutes. The Soviets tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that could not be intercepted, and President Nikita Khrushchev admitted the crimes of the Soviet past.

In Canada the Liberal government felt the changing winds of international politics, and Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent condemned the British-French collusion, declaring that the age of “supermen” had passed. Although his remarks offended many English Canadians, they recognized an important truth: the old colonial empires were quickly collapsing. At Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of new or emerging states declared a position of neutrality in the Cold War. “Sisters and Brothers,” Indonesian president Achmad Sukarno intoned at the opening, “how terrifically dynamic is our time! … Nations and States have awoken from a sleep of centuries … We, the people of Asia and Africa, far more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilize what I have called the ‘Moral Violence of Nations’ in favour of peace.”¹⁷

Trudeau quickly accepted the justice of this cause. His travels had made him suspect frontiers—the dangers they created and the damage they did to people who lived around them. He worried about nationalism in the developing countries as much as in Canada. In 1957 he joined a Commonwealth group under the auspices of the World University Service that travelled to Ghana, the first decolonized African member of the Commonwealth. While he welcomed the liberation, he worried about what the future held for Ghanaians. In discussions, he presented the case that “culture can exist only if people are able to provide themselves with [the] instruments of government.”¹⁸ He was already worried that those instruments in the developing world were weak. And he was right.

This onrush of world events stirred Trudeau and others like him in Quebec. Increasingly, the conservative nationalism of Duplessis and the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church was on the defensive, as Trudeau and his colleagues championed the concept and principles embodied in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These principles in turn influenced a series of important judicial decisions in Canada in the fifties. Trudeau, drawing on his legal training, began to work closely with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and, especially, with F.R. Scott in asserting the importance of individual rights. In 1957 the Supreme Court of Canada finally struck down Duplessis’s notorious 1937 Padlock Law, which permitted the state to “lock” down any facilities where it believed “Communist or Bolshevik” activity had occurred. Scott was the principal lawyer in that case as well as in the Roncarelli case. In 1946 Duplessis had denied Roncarelli’s tavern a liquor licence because he had paid bail for some Jehovah’s Witnesses who insisted on their right to free speech. Roncarelli sued Duplessis, and the case made its way through the courts and through the elections of 1952 and 1956, where Duplessis made effective use of it:

The Liberals were not going to take the side of the Witnesses any more than they were ready to declare any partisanship for the Communists, so Duplessis was free to disport himself as the indispensable rampart of democracy and established Christianity … against enemies that had no audible spokesmen. It was like hunting; it was good sport. Duplessis was a great nimrod, hunting subversive rodents, and the federal game warden kept interfering with him.¹⁹

The Liberals remained silent when Duplessis passed a preposterous law in 1953 that authorized the provincial government to ban any religious movement that published “abusive or insulting attacks” on the established religions. Such legislation horrified and embarrassed Trudeau. In 1959 the “federal game warden”—the Supreme Court of Canada—finally decided in favour of Scott and Roncarelli and against Duplessis, who was ordered to pay damages of $46,132. That he did—not from his own pocket but from funds advanced by the Union nationale.

Although historians first treated the fifties as a “return to normalcy,” much as the twenties had been, closer scrutiny has revealed the strong dynamic for change that emerged from unlikely places—from suburbs and urban slums, coffee houses and country music. Just as Jean Marchand had sung Monique Leyrac’s “Les lumières de ma ville” during the 1949 Asbestos Strike, in the 1950s Félix Leclerc gained international celebrity as he spun his musical folk tales of Quebec life. As a popular Québécois musical culture developed, it faced powerful competition from the blues and the rock rhythms of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and the first Motown beats that bellowed from the Impala hardtops that “cruised” St. Catherine Street. Trudeau treasured Leclerc, Leyrac, and the other chansonniers, but he found rock an alien dialect, even though his lithe body followed its beat in the late fifties on the dance floor. And, when his mother sorted out some of the Trudeau real-estate holdings, she asked Pierre if he wanted to take over some space at 518 Sherbrooke West, in the heart of the new nightlife district. While he retained his Outremont home address with her, the downtown “pad” brought him close to the new excitement on Montreal streets as the sixties approached. It also gave him independence, just as his appeal to and interest in women was strong.

Madeleine Perron, for example, wrote a note praising Cité libre, but especially its editor. She asked if he had time between “two conquests” to send her a copy of the latest issue and concluded, “My admiration to the author, my hommage and respect to the prince, and my biggest peck to Pierre.” Doris Lussier, who was gaining fame as an actor in the new television hit La famille Plouffe/The Plouffe Family, in both English and French Canada, supported his attack on clericalism in Cité libre, ending her message with the words “Long live your liberty! Sacred Pierre. You are peerless, like a Greek god.” Lionel Tiger, a McGill professor who also enjoyed Montreal’s nightlife, sent “regards to the exquisite woman with whom I occasionally see you living the good life with.”

Carroll Guérin, an artist and occasional model to whom he likely referred, certainly was exquisitely beautiful, and she became one of Trudeau’s most frequent companions in the late fifties. In her elegance, dress, and appearance, she strikingly resembled Grace Kelly, the American movie star who married Prince Rainier of Monaco and dominated the tabloids of the day. And indeed, Trudeau did pursue women very much as the Greek gods did—or, for that matter, Prince Rainier. When a student in England did not return his calls during one of his visits, he wrote:

Perhaps I am beginning to look ridiculously like the running gentleman harassing the perfect woman … Still for a short while yet it remains that “spring is a ‘perhaps’ hand in a window,” and as I am leaving for France shortly I will have one more go at this perhaps business. And I invite you to tea, or dinner, or to the theater, or to the cinema, or the concert on Wednesday, the 26th. If you want to bother refusing or accepting, you can phone me at Dominions Hotel … Otherwise I will be waiting for you outside the Academy, 65 Gower St., between 5:15 and 5:45 on Wednesday.

Alas, we don’t know if she showed. But there were many others who did.²⁰

In a time marked by conformity, Trudeau was different, and the difference charmed. He took a major role as a lawyer in the fifties in challenging orthodoxy, as the courts broke down the layers of prejudice that had formed around private clubs and social groups. This burst of “civil rights” cases reactivated Trudeau’s legal instincts and recalled his outrage in the previous decade with the internment of both Camillien Houde (for his opposition to conscription) and Adrien Arcand (for his fascist sympathies). The dramatic 1954 United States Supreme Court decision on racial segregation in schools, Brown vs. Board of Education, raised the bar for previously smug Canadians who had criticized Americans at the same time as they ignored segregation in Halifax and southern Ontario schools or overlooked clubs and universities that barred Jews.^*

The newspaper Vrai became a crusading voice for those whose rights were destroyed or undermined, whether Jehovah’s Witnesses, mental patients, or Wilbert Coffin, a backwoods guide who, editor Jacques Hébert believed, had wrongfully been convicted of murdering three American hunters. Trudeau joined with his close friend Hébert in these campaigns and wrote long articles for him explaining the origins of democracy and liberty. When Duplessis called an election for June 20, 1956, Trudeau decided to stay in Quebec that spring to be an active participant in the campaign—active, but not Liberal. The Liberal Party was not yet a palatable alternative for him, even though its leader, Georges-Émile Lapalme, had restructured it and sought out better candidates. But the party was broke, while Duplessis’s Union nationale was awash with funds that it used shamelessly to favour friendly newspapers, buy gifts for voters, and reward constituencies that elected its candidates. Duplessis’s decisive victory seemed to confirm that, in Quebec, provincial election success could be bought. During the election, the sixty-six-year-old four-term premier faced a coalition of opponents ranging from the labour unions to the Social Credit “Créditiste” movement. Still, Duplessis managed to capture headlines, especially in his favoured rural areas, with inflammatory charges that the federal government, and Cabinet minister Jean Lesage in particular, had intervened by importing—of all things—“Communist eggs” from Poland to Quebec. By the time the Liberals recovered, the Union nationale “had already saturated the province with pamphlets and newspaper advertising conjuring up the lurid spectacle of the imminent arrival of a new communist armada flying the hammer and sickle, bringing more federally procured eggs for the unsuspecting breakfast tables of the province.”²¹

Meanwhile, the CCF had remade itself into the Parti social démocratique (PSD) under the leadership of Trudeau’s friend Thérèse Casgrain—the daughter of a millionaire French-Canadian stockbroker, and herself a remarkable and strikingly attractive woman—who had headed the campaign for women’s suffrage in Quebec for many decades. Grace Trudeau reported the name change to Pierre in the late summer of 1955, while he was driving his Jaguar in Europe: “Did you know that the CCF party name had been changed? Mrs. Casgrain was invited on the TV last week to give her views—as she remarked to me on the phone today—this was no doubt only because of changing the party’s name.” She also wrote in October that “Mrs. Casgrain” had called to discuss an article about her that had appeared in Le Devoir. She generally liked it, except for a “remark on her figure ‘taille haute et robuste.’” In Grace’s opinion, the photograph beside the article denied the adjective “robuste.”²² Trudeau supported Casgrain in her whimsical quest to reposition the party, but we do not know whether, in the privacy of the polling booth in Outremont, he voted for Lapalme (who stood for the Liberals in the riding and won overwhelmingly) or he was one of the 726 souls who cast their ballot for the PSD candidate (who finished last behind the Communist contender).

We do know that Trudeau joined with several other left-leaning personalities, including René Lévesque, in writing a letter to Le Devoir attacking the Liberal Party for its phoney “nationalist” attack on the PSD for being centralist and controlled by English Canadians.²³ Overall, the PSD won only 0.6 percent of the vote, while Duplessis triumphed with 51.8 percent and seventy-three seats—both figures slightly higher than in 1952.²⁴ It was a stunning defeat for the Liberals, who took only twenty seats, three fewer than before, with 45 percent of the vote. The results provided vivid testimony to the ineffectiveness of the opposition and the unfairness of the electoral system.

What did Duplessis’s triumph mean? Did all those carefully crafted articles, those brilliant analyses of the inevitable emergence of Quebec from an authoritarian, priest-ridden past, and the engagement in opposition of so many of the finest minds of the media and the university count for so little? How did it all happen? In his first article in Cité libre in 1950, Trudeau had called on those who opposed the current regime in Quebec to be “coldly intelligent.” Perhaps they were not.

The election results, as well as the refusal of the Liberals to integrate the Cité libre program into their own platform, suggest that Trudeau and his colleagues were sowing a lot of seed on very barren ground. Cité libre has loomed large in history because its principals later became eminent in Quebec and in Canadian public life. At the time, however, the journal merely exasperated Duplessis and was usually ignored. It was not compulsory reading among Quebec City politicians or officials.²⁵ Moreover, its range was surprisingly narrow and its publication irregular. In the final four years of the Union nationale, 1956 through 1959, Cité libre published a grand total of nine irregularly spaced issues. The subscription records also fail to impress. In February 1954 Cité libre had only 444 subscribers, of whom 115 had not paid or had disappeared. The remainder were sold by the directors or in bookshops. In 1957–58 the print run was approximately 1,500 copies, compared with almost 15,000 for the Jesuit-controlled Relations and over 2,000 for L’Action nationale.

In addition, Cité libre’s range and character of subscribers in the mid-fifties was disappointing. There were only six subscriptions from France, and few outside Ottawa or the province of Quebec. The grand hopes of a journal that would complement or even rival France’s politically influential and socialist Esprit had been abandoned. The French, as happened too often, did not reciprocate the warm embrace of the Cité libristes and, by the end of the 1950s, Trudeau, Pelletier, and others grumbled about Esprit’s ignorance of Quebec. Members of the journal’s editorial board constantly reminded friends to renew, carried issues to conferences, and extracted a few dollars from those who could afford it. Trudeau sent mocking letters to friends, saying that, if they were truly poor, they need not pay the $2 subscription cost; otherwise, they should pay up. Pierre Vadeboncoeur, whose “share” Trudeau initially subsidized, compensated by enthusiastically selling copies wherever he went. For Guy Cormier, who had moved to New Brunswick, the pressure to peddle and personally subsidize the journal was too much, and he tried to resign in 1958. Maurice Blain attempted to escape as well. Finally, in 1960, after the fall of Duplessis, the review was reorganized under the leadership of Jacques Hébert, fully funded, and suddenly began to prosper. Ironically, its best times lay in the past.²⁶

It’s easy to mock a bunch of intellectuals talking to themselves, having long dinners and debates over wine in living rooms or basements furnished with cracked-leather couches, their wives and girlfriends mostly silent or pouring the drinks, and the men warily testing the newcomers or arguing over where commas belong.^* Despite its infrequency and limitations, however, Cité libre mattered enormously to Trudeau at the time—and later. He had no university position, no regular column in a newspaper, no affiliation with a major political party, no seat on corporate boards, and, unlike René Lévesque with his regular program, he appeared only intermittently on the sensational new medium of television.

Trudeau seemed to resent Lévesque’s celebrity, particularly when he became the exciting new voice of the French-language media after his dramatic coverage of the Korean War. The anecdote about their first meeting in a CBC cafeteria is revealing. “Hi, guys!” Lévesque said as he spied Trudeau and Pelletier at a table planning a new issue of Cité libre. But before Lévesque could sit down, Trudeau retorted: “Hey, Lévesque, you’re a hell of a good speaker, but I’m starting to wonder whether you can write.” Lévesque had failed to deliver some promised piece for the journal. “How can I find the time?” Lévesque shot back. But Trudeau would not relent: “Television’s all very well,” he said, “but there’s nothing solid about it, as you know … Now, if you knew how to write, maybe with a little effort now and then—” “If that’s what you think, you can go peddle your potatoes, you bloody washout of an intellectual,” Lévesque exploded.²⁷ Cité libre gave Trudeau the finest potatoes he could peddle at the time.

The subscribers might be few, but they talked a lot and eventually they mattered. Frank Scott congratulated the editors on the first issue, in which he found “the socialist spirit was present even if it was well hidden.” Senator Charles “Chubby” Power, a powerful Quebec City minister in the King government, wrote to Trudeau in 1953 congratulating him on the journal but, interestingly, dissenting on his strong criticism of Quebec nationalism. Father Georges-Henri Lévesque took notice of Trudeau’s ideas in Cité libre, as did young students who would later make their mark in Quebec intellectual and political life. Pelletier complained that although the journal had an enormous impact in religious colleges, that influence meant only two or three subscriptions because tattered and clandestine copies were passed around almost like sexy French postcards. The author Roch Carrier recalled how a young priest would quiz him about Cité libre, and he soon began to realize that it was not to rebuke him but to discover what the sensational but forbidden publication had recently said.²⁸ At a time when Trudeau’s responses to criticisms of his writings were denied publication by Catholic reviews or newspapers, Cité libre provided him with a platform from which to respond.

The readers included Guy Favreau and Lucien Cardin, both future justice ministers in the Pearson government; Eugene Forsey, the research director of the Canadian Congress of Labour; many Canadian diplomats, including Jean Chapdelaine, Pierre Trottier, and Trudeau’s future undersecretary of external affairs, Marcel Cadieux; as well as the Union nationale politician Daniel Johnson, the eminent journalist Blair Fraser, the poet Earle Birney, the young philosopher Charles Taylor, and Canada’s renowned political philosopher C.B. Macpherson. As the editor, Trudeau dealt directly with submissions from authors, and he now had the opportunity to work closely with the finest young minds in Quebec, including the political scientist Léon Dion, the sociologist Guy Rocher, and the essayist Jean Le Moyne (who would be his French speech writer when he became prime minister). The relationships that he forged as editor lasted—and they mattered.²⁹

Still, the criticisms of the journal stung. The 1956 devastating election results revealed how politically ineffectual not only Cité libre but also the other critics of the Duplessis government had been. The Liberal performance in Quebec deeply disappointed; and, alarmingly, the Liberal government in Ottawa had also begun to stumble. St. Laurent slumped in his Commons seat in depression as the Conservatives and others ferociously attacked his government for arrogance. Well past the biblical three score and ten, St. Laurent seemed incapable of reacting imaginatively to the challenges of Canada and Quebec. The government drifted and, in 1957, it was defeated by the Conservatives under John Diefenbaker. The Conservatives lost the popular vote because Quebec remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Liberals and St. Laurent, yet they won the most seats and formed the government on June 21, 1957. The unilingual Diefenbaker won only nine seats in Quebec but managed to take power by ignoring Quebec in his electoral strategy. St. Laurent soon resigned, and Pearson became his inevitable successor as Liberal Party leader. In Montreal, Jean Drapeau, who had been elected as mayor on a reform platform in 1954, lost his position in 1957. It was, for the reformers, a bitter loss and a bad year.

This rapid shift of the political terrain left Pierre Trudeau and his colleagues much less surefooted, so in the summer of 1956 he and others organized Le Rassemblement, a grouping of intellectuals, professionals, and labour officials with the specific goal of promoting democracy. It refused to affiliate with any party, but, instead, announced it would work for progressive approaches to Quebec politics. Trudeau had always admired popular movements and their leaders—men such as Paul Gouin, Henri Bourassa, and, in the city of Montreal, Jean Drapeau. They had rejected the special interests embedded in the traditional parties and set out to create their own parties—groupings based on a popular movement with a clear program. He hoped to do the same with the Rassemblement.

At its founding convention on September 8, the noted scientist and academic Pierre Dansereau from the Université de Montréal became its first president, with Trudeau as vice-president. Among the directors were his friends and colleagues André Laurendeau, Jacques Hébert, and Gérard Pelletier. The Rassemblement mingled Cité libre modernizers with neonationalists like Laurendeau who believed that traditional nationalism’s link with the church was dangerously misguided, and that Quebec’s social and economic system needed rapid change. Few members had direct political experience, and most were suspicious of political involvement. The new organization existed uneasily somewhere between a lobbying group and a fledgling political party. Not surprisingly, it was politically ineffective.³⁰

Laurendeau, who had worked with the Bloc populaire canadien in the forties, soon lost interest as the members began to bicker.^* The Laval political scientist Gérard Bergeron, an early member, identified the problem in his 1957 description of the “Rassemblement type” as one who had originally disdained direct political action, then become involved in social action, and, suddenly, in the mid-fifties, realized that the solution to social problems must come through the “politics” he continued to despise. In his memoirs, Trudeau claimed that he turned to the Rassemblement because the major parties in Quebec remained unacceptable and the CCF’s Parti social démocratique was weak, its policies too centralist and too reflective of the concerns of English Canada. The only alternative was the Rassemblement, a “fragile and short-lived body … [created] to defend and promote democracy in Quebec against the threats posed by corruption and authoritarianism.”

Throughout its brief history, its members quarrelled about membership, possible affiliation with the Parti social démocratique, and the role they should take in direct political action. Trudeau persisted in his belief that the Rassemblement was the best political choice available, and he became its third and final president in 1959. By then, Laurendeau had resigned, saying that he found the group’s intellectualism too remote from the everyday voter, who, in the end, would decide the nature of social change.³¹

Laurendeau’s complaints about the Rassemblement were cause for concern, but Jean Marchand’s opposition was much more serious. After meeting with “Comrade Marchand” in late August 1957, Pelletier told Trudeau that Marchand wanted to reflect on matters before proceeding further with the group. He specifically wanted “a self-examination about what we are and what we are doing about the R and what the relationship between the R and the real world is.” Marchand always insisted that Pelletier’s and Trudeau’s intellectual activities should have a direct connection to the “real” world, where workers woke at 6 a.m., earned barely enough to send their children to school, and lacked the pensions that would have protected them in their old age. The Conféderation des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC) was divided on the usefulness of the Rassemblement, and the other unions had merged to become the Quebec Federation of Labour (QFL). This new organization was directly linked with the Canadian Labour Congress, and its leaders were urging workers to support the CCF. Where did that leave the Rassemblement?³²

In the end, Marchand did abandon the Rassemblement, but it lingered on in political limbo. Although Trudeau remained active, the organization was feeble, with membership fees arriving intermittently and a bank balance of only $71.13 on August 15, 1958.³³ In The Asbestos Strike in 1956, Trudeau had argued for a just society based on socialist principles, but one year later he was already recoiling from the Parti social démocratique, the Quebec socialist party, and claiming that “democracy” must come before the social revolution. Quebec, he urged, must have democracy before it could change its social and economic institutions.

Despite his frustration with the political scene in Quebec, Trudeau split with his reformist colleagues on one provocative issue—his argument that Duplessis was correct to refuse federal grants for universities. Yet here, too, he was being consistent, for he had already expressed this view in the brief he had written in 1954 for the Tremblay Commission. He had been overruled by the research director, Eugene Forsey, so the draft was altered, but Trudeau’s mind was not.³⁴ He had recommended a clear division of responsibilities between the federal and the provincial governments, along with restraint by the federal government in using its taxing authority to invade provincial fields. When, in 1956, Louis St. Laurent allowed Quebec’s grants to be held in trust by the National Conference of Canadian Universities until Duplessis relented, Trudeau’s opposition seemed inexplicable to some and infuriating to others.

Trudeau responded in Cité libre the following January, arguing that the federal government had no right to take excess tax revenues and create devices by which it could then invade provincial jurisdictions. The crisis of the universities, which, in the fifties, were becoming the motors of modernization, was real. Between 1945 and 1953, the enrolment at Laval had grown by 109.6 percent and, in the same period, the Quebec government’s budget had increased by 194 percent. Yet the provincial grant to Laval had gone up only 7 percent. Professors, whose salaries had exceeded those of most other professionals in 1940, had, by 1951, seen their average earnings rise by only 17.4 percent to $3,850 per year, while other professionals saw an increase from $2,502 to $9,206 in the same period.³⁵

Understandably, some university teachers who had fought the battle for increased funding in Cité libre now complained that the independently wealthy Trudeau did not understand their personal plight. As tempers flared, traditional nationalists and, of course, Duplessis warily accepted the support of their often bitter antagonist, but Trudeau shunned their embrace. If Quebec universities were poor, he said, the fault lay within Quebec, specifically within the provincial government that had refused to fund universities adequately. At a student congress at Laval in November 1957 he urged professors and students to begin a general strike to force Duplessis to become more generous.^* An outraged editorial writer at Le Soleil, Quebec City’s leading newspaper, countered with a lead editorial attacking his irresponsibility.³⁶

Trudeau might be unpredictable, yet he was usually consistent as he carefully honed his political identity. In Vrai he wrote a series of articles on democracy, liberalism, politics, and political thought.³⁷ In other writings, principally in Cité libre, he defined his stand on particular themes. On radio and on television he took part in numerous debates on contemporary issues, often stirring criticism. One radio program caused much controversy: he asked when it was right to assassinate a tyrant. Given that many critics called Duplessis a tyrant, Trudeau surely knew he would provoke a response. In an article in Vrai he had already written that if the social order was perverse, citizens should follow their conscience rather than any authority: “And if the only sure means to re-establish a just order is to wage a revolution against a tyrannical and illegal authority, well, then, do it.” On radio, the qualifications that appeared in print—“personally I dislike violence”—were lost. A municipal politician jumped into the debate and declared Vrai and Trudeau more dangerous than the “yellow press” that the religious authorities had condemned. Pierre Trudeau’s article, he fumed, was “a direct call for sedition.” It was a serious offence “to preach revolution.”

Jacques Hébert, the editor, replied on Trudeau’s behalf in the sarcastic and personal tone increasingly common in Quebec political debate in the mid-1950s: “Brave M. Lauriault, you thought you read: ‘Is it necessary to assassinate an imbecile?’ and you became terrified. But rest assured; it is only about tyrants. Therefore, you are not endangered. Sleep quietly. The revolutionaries won’t waste their cannonballs on wet noodles like you.”³⁸

To escape this parochial and disputatious environment, Trudeau sought new intellectual outlets. In March 1957 the University of Toronto Quarterly had invited him to write an article on political parties in Quebec. He refused, saying that “the orientation of my actions within the next several months hinges upon a series of decisions which are still being collectively pondered and are still in the making. It is fundamentally a question of what is going to happen to a new democratic [“political” is crossed out] movement we have founded—the Rassemblement.” He did, however, begin to prepare an article for a book to be edited by Mason Wade, author of the standard history textbook The French Canadians. When the book was delayed, Trudeau submitted his piece to the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science (CJEPS), which published it in August 1958 under the title “Some Obstacles to Democracy in Quebec.”

Trudeau’s arguments flowed from a familiar stream of analysis of Quebec’s political development, and echoed other voices, such as recent work by Michel Brunet, a nationalist historian at the Université de Montréal, which claimed there were three dominant themes in French-Canadian social and political thought: “l’agriculture, l’anti-étatisme et le messianisme.” But to most English Canadians at the time, these views were new. CJEPS was read by virtually every economist, political scientist, and historian working in the English language, and some politicians and journalists also subscribed. In common rooms, cocktail parties, and even a few Muskoka cottages, Trudeau’s article caused a stir.³⁹

In forceful prose and polemical argument, Trudeau made his case that, “in the opinion of the French in Canada, government of the people by the people could not be for the people, but mainly for the English-speaking part of that people; such were the spoils of conquest.” French Canadians had democracy but did not believe in it: “In all important aspects of national politics, guile, compromise, and a subtle kind of blackmail decide their course and determine their alliances. They appear to discount all political or social ideologies, save nationalism.”

Although he criticized English Canadians who believed in democracy for themselves but not for others, his critique of the authoritarianism of the Quebec past, the corruption of contemporary Quebec politics, and the blend of nationalism with a conservative Roman Catholic Church and a weak Quebec state resonated widely in English Canada—too widely in some cases. John Stevenson, a veteran Ottawa journalist for The Times of London, praised the article generously in a letter to Trudeau: “For a French-Canadian to make such an arraignment of his racial compatriots required great moral courage, and you certainly showed it in your article.” He even asked for some off-prints to send to the Queen’s private secretary.⁴⁰ The following year Trudeau’s article won the prize sponsored by the president of the University of Western Ontario for the best scholarly article in English. Grace Trudeau reported that the award received prominent mention in the English press of Montreal but not in the French press.⁴¹

Wherever he could, Trudeau pressed his case for greater democracy in Quebec. He covered the provincial Liberal convention in May 1958 for both Vrai and the CBC and concluded that the party and the convention were anti-democratic:

It would be unjust to impute to the Liberal Party alone an anti-democratic tendency which is the characteristic of our people as a whole. To be sure, a party that has dominated the political life of our province for so long bears a major responsibility for our political infancy. But other factors also make a significant contribution: the authoritarianism of our religious and social institutions, the insecurity complex deriving from the Conquest, the systematic degradation of our civic life under the Union nationale, and many other factors as well.

Trudeau condemned the Liberal Party Congress as undemocratic not because of party officials or even party rules but because the Liberal Party itself failed to realize that a party cannot be built from above. The congress had been given little time for policy discussion; its purpose, after all, had been to choose the leader. He recognized that the new leader, Jean Lesage, a federal MP for thirteen years, was “a fighter, an energetic organizer and a charming and ambitious man,” but there was no evidence, he said, that he was a democrat or that a party under his leadership would become the mass-based political movement essential to obliterating the forces of reaction and authoritarianism in Quebec.⁴²

On a copy of Lesage’s acceptance speech, Trudeau underlined Lesage’s call for the party to seek the active sympathy of “all honest citizens who want to serve the democratic ideal,” and for those groups that wish to “pursue their action from the margins of existing political parties” to rally under the Liberal banner to defeat Duplessis. At this point in the document he scrawled, “Drapeau?”⁴³

In 1954 Jean Drapeau had won the Montreal mayoralty as the head of the non-partisan Civic Action League. Might not the mayor and his movement be an alternative to Lesage if it were to spread its democratic embrace beyond Montreal? Drapeau, who perhaps shared the dream, invited Gérard Pelletier, Trudeau, and the activist Jean-Paul Lefebvre to the basement of his home in the Cité-Jardin. The talk went badly when, according to Pelletier, Trudeau and Drapeau fought over the nature of democracy and “Trudeau invoked principles that were very disturbing to the practical mind of Drapeau.”⁴⁴ Trudeau truly believed a popular movement based on the young and an educated working class could achieve genuine social change in Quebec. Drapeau thought he was unrealistic.

Trudeau’s consistency of views was becoming the enemy of compromise—and he increasingly antagonized his former colleagues and friends. In the minutes of meetings of the Rassemblement, he is central in defining its purpose and direction. He took the lead in steering the group away from the Parti social démocratique, to the distress of Thérèse Casgrain and its new leader, Michel Chartrand, who had hoped that Trudeau’s socialism would bring about his definite commitment to the party. He had worked closely with Chartrand in the anti-conscription campaigns of the early 1940s and through all the labour actions of the 1950s. Now they were becoming antagonists.

But if Trudeau disappointed Drapeau, Chartrand, and others, he thrilled an eighteen-year-old Ottawa student who met him at a Rassemblement meeting in Ottawa in April 1957. Madeleine Gobeil, who was to play a major part in his personal life, had read Cité libre and the book on the Asbestos Strike. Now, she wrote, she would like to know more about the myths surrounding Pierre Trudeau.⁴⁵ He responded to her letter with a serious discussion about politics, but he remained elusive about himself. Nevertheless, her interest charmed him, and they stayed in contact with each other until his marriage in 1971.

Gradually, television also contributed to the myth that was developing about Pierre Trudeau. Although he appeared much less often on the magic screen than Lévesque or Laurendeau, sometimes, he stole the scene. On one occasion on his program Pays et Merveilles, Laurendeau taunted him about being a young millionaire touring the world. “Did you use a rickshaw, the Chinese vehicle where ‘coolies’ pull the rich?” he demanded, archly. “Yes,” responded Trudeau, “but I put the coolie in the seat and pulled the rickshaw myself.”⁴⁶ The quick repartee that was the mark of the public Trudeau was already apparent.

By the fall of 1958 it was clear that Jean Lesage was having some success in rallying the opponents of Duplessis behind him, but his arguments did not convince Trudeau. Rather, in the October 1958 issue of Cité libre, Trudeau announced the creation of yet another new grouping—the Union des forces démocratiques—a movement that aimed to bring together everyone who shared a belief in democratic principles. Those who committed themselves to its Democratic Manifesto were not allowed to be members of political parties that refused to support the new Union. With the lowest cards in the deck, the Union bluffed and pretended it had the highest trump. The Rassemblement continued to exist, but the Union became the new vehicle for popular political reform—primarily through the accumulation of signatures that were intended to indicate political strength.^* Trudeau signed the document as the president of the Rassemblement, but there were few other prominent or inspiring new faces.⁴⁷

Over at Cité libre, Gérard Pelletier was becoming uneasy regarding the finances, the gaps between issues, and, increasingly, the divisions within the group. The directors gathered on November 11, 1958, in the grand Outremont home Trudeau still shared with his mother—the first time since a sparsely attended meeting in May. The minutes bear a strained sense of humour: “Mr. Pierre Vadeboncoeur’s absence was regretted by no one; Mr. Gilles Marcotte’s, whose sympathy for Cité libre was notorious, was lamentable. The absence of two directors, Messieurs Charles Lussier and Roger Rolland, whose commitment to Cité libre has become more and more intermittent, has been noted.” Trudeau began with a complaint about the funding of the journal, pointing out that, in the past, a few of the directors had been obliged to pay personally for the publication of some of the issues. How the other directors reacted as they sat in a room with a famed Braque and a startling Pellan painting on the walls, elegant china in a cabinet nearby, and Grenier, the chauffeur, outside was not recorded in the minutes. They agreed to prepare another issue, for which the missing Vadeboncoeur was given major responsibility. They did not accept Guy Cormier’s suggestion that the journal should add a statement on its cover page that “the articles published in the review do not reflect the opinions of Cité libre but only the authors themselves.” Pelletier argued that such a statement would “separate” the journal too much from the opinions expressed in it.

The directors met again just before Christmas at Gérard Pelletier’s more modest home at 2391 Benny: “One doesn’t know whether it was the approaching Christmas season, the Jingle Bells on St. Catherine Street, the Santa Clauses in the store windows that stirred the spirits of the participants, but the assembly was a wild one.” At one point, Pelletier, who was chairing the meeting, pointed his index finger at Trudeau and told him to shut up because, for once, he was not the chair, so couldn’t talk whenever he wished.^* Trudeau, the minutes recorded, refused to heed the chair’s rebuke. Once again the meeting went badly. Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who was absent again, had told Trudeau that he had no time for an issue on “peace” that he had earlier proposed. They were left with a few potential articles, most of them already overdue. Trudeau would see if a December 1958 conference in Ottawa on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had any useful material. Réginald Boisvert promised a piece on three university students who were protesting outside Duplessis’s office, including Laurendeau’s daughter Francine and the future Trudeau minister Jean-Pierre Goyer. Before long, however, Boisvert resigned from Cité libre, declaring he had lost interest.⁴⁸

The two groups—the Rassemblement and the Union des forces démocratiques—had brought attention to Trudeau’s belief that a broad democratic mass movement was necessary to defeat the Union nationale and the forces of reaction. Now another new argument became strongly identified with Trudeau in these years: that participation in the democratic process and individual rights took precedence over the collective rights of the group and the authority of leaders, whether of church or state. He became a crusading lawyer for the cause, taking on cases that supported the rights of aggrieved individuals against both the state and the church. His clients ranged from the Canadian Sunbathing Association, which was violently raided by Quebec provincial police officers bearing cameras as well as guns, to the inmates of asylums and hospitals. The sunbathers seemed to intrigue him—he spent considerable time researching their case. He also vigorously supported Jacques Hébert’s defence of the accused murderer Wilbert Coffin and, after Hébert was convicted for contempt of court, he successfully took his appeal to the Quebec Court of Appeal. He became even closer to Frank Scott, after the law professor moved directly from the classroom into the courtroom to win victories in the Supreme Court in the Roncarelli case and the Padlock Law case. Trudeau made sure to attend some of the sittings for these historic cases.

These decisions, along with Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s announcement of a Canadian Bill of Rights, intrigued Trudeau and drew his attention to the courts outside Quebec. At the December 1958 conference on the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in Ottawa, he encountered Bora Laskin, the future chief justice, who was emerging as the major legal academic in English Canada. Laskin, like Frank Scott, had begun to argue strongly for a Canadian bill of rights in the mid-1950s—Laskin, in particular, believed that the debate over the bill raised fundamental issues of Canadian federalism. His approach was highly layered: “The most fundamental civil liberties (freedom of association, speech, and religion) were exclusively assigned to federal authorities,” while others, including those associated with legal process or economic entitlements, might be either federal or provincial, depending on the precise right.

Scott differed from Laskin on this issue by arguing for the constitutional entrenchment of all important rights. Trudeau sided with Scott: he looked on the Constitution not only as a protector of political rights but as a means of placing limits on “the liberal idea of property” that was “hampering the march toward economic democracy.” It was a debate in which Trudeau, who had already argued for a bill of rights encompassing “the most fundamental civil liberties” in his presentation to the Tremblay Commission four years earlier, was to become an important participant and, ultimately, the most significant one.⁴⁹ The debates linking federalism and civil liberties flowed directly into discussions about the future of Quebec—once Maurice Duplessis was out of the way. Moreover, Trudeau’s increasing participation in these debates and the publication of his article in the Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science made him much better known among English Canadians.

No person was more important in Trudeau’s introduction to English Canada than Frank Scott—a foremost literary talent, legal scholar, and socialist political activist. Trudeau recalled first meeting Scott when he came to the Université de Montréal in 1943 to speak understandingly of French Canadians and their opposition to conscription. Scott, for his part, believed that he first saw Trudeau at an anti-Semitic and anti-Communist rally in the late thirties. He was deeply concerned by what he termed “fascism in Quebec” and became a leader in the transformation of Canadian socialism from the authoritarianism evident in the Regina Manifesto to a Western European democratic socialist party. Despite his loathing of fascism, he had initially been opposed to Canadian participation in the Second World War, and was the most prominent English-Canadian voice arguing the case of Quebec opposition to conscription.

Scott and Trudeau met each other frequently as they worked on civil liberty questions in the early fifties and became active in the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Scott was Trudeau’s anglophone ideal: a highly intellectual man whose ideas were balanced by the practical needs of everyday politics; a constitutional lawyer who sought to protect individual rights within a bill of rights; and a poet who was also an eminent social scientist. A large man whose ubiquitous pipe created a pensive presence, Scott intimidated gently. Women adored him, and he responded generously—to his artist wife Marian’s considerable dismay. Trudeau welcomed invitations to Scott’s parties at his country house in the Eastern Townships, where beautiful young anglophone students clustered about the professor. He also gained access to leading European socialists through Scott’s introduction. Here was a man of considerable substance—and he intrigued Trudeau.⁵⁰

In the late winter of 1956, just as the book on the Asbestos Strike was finally to be published, Trudeau heard that Scott was planning a trip to learn first hand about the North. As an experienced voyageur, Trudeau apparently called Scott to ask if he could join him on the adventure. Initially Scott was taken aback, but he respected Trudeau’s ability in the wilds and, perhaps, Trudeau also intrigued him. Once in the canoe together, they got along well. Both were physically strong, although Trudeau, the smaller man, typically took on challenges that seemed reckless to Scott. Ever the poet, he described one occasion when Trudeau entered a tremendous surge of water at the point where the Peace River and Lake Athabasca merged. He yelled, “You can’t go into that,” but Trudeau ignored his pleas and forged on:

Pierre, suddenly challenged,
Stripped and walked into the rapids,
Firming his feet against rock,
Standing white, in white water,
Leaning south up the current
To stem the downward rush,
A man testing his strength
Against the strength of his country.⁵¹

Just as Trudeau’s journeys in the early 1940s had traced the path of the nationalist hero, so the journey into the Canadian Northwest also seems to have been a nationalist experience, one that made Scott and Trudeau understand the vastness of the land, its harsh demands, and its endless rewards. In another of his poems on the trip, “Fort Providence,” Scott wrote:

We came out of Beaver Lake
Into swift water,
Past the Big Snye, past Providence Island
And nosed our barges into shore
Till they grated on stones and sand.
Gang planks, thrown to the bank,
Were all we had for dock
To drop four tons of freight.

A line of men were squatting
Silently above us, straight
Black hair, swarthy skins.
Slavies they call them, who left
Their name on Lake and River.

None of them spoke or moved
Just sat and watched, quietly,
While the white man heaved at his hardware.
Farther on, by themselves,
The women and girls were huddled.

They saw from far off the fortlike school where a Grey Nun from Montreal was in charge, and they spoke French to the priests and nuns who taught the native Slaveys in their own broken English.

We walked through the crowded classrooms.
No map of Canada or the Territories,
No library or workshop,
Everywhere religious scenes,
Christ and Saints, Stations of the Cross,
Beads hanging from nails, crucifixes,
And two kinds of secular art
Silk-screen prints of the Group of Seven,
And crayon drawings and masks
Made by the younger children,
The single visible expression
Of the soul of these broken people.

Upstairs on the second storey
Seventy little cots
Touching end to end
In a room 30 by 40
Housed the resident boys
In this firetrap mental gaol.

The natives learning English from French priests, the missing maps, and the haunting reference to the residential school surely left a deep imprint on Pierre Trudeau’s mind, one that would later influence his own and his country’s future.⁵² For now, however, the adventurers returned home safely, bonded by their challenge to the Canadian North and their common understanding of Canada’s possibilities.^* Just as he had at the Ontario camp long before, Trudeau had tested his strength against a foreign physical world and discovered he could conquer it easily.

Trudeau began to participate regularly in English-language television programs, including coverage of the 1958 election with his old family friend Blair Fraser on the CBC, and he took part in other activities organized by English-Canadian groups. In 1957, for example, at the World University Service of Canada summer program in Ghana, other delegates included Douglas Anglin, a Carleton University specialist on Africa; James Talman, from the University of Western Ontario; Don Johnston, Trudeau’s future lawyer and Cabinet minister; Robert Kaplan, another Trudeau minister to be; Tim Porteous, a future Trudeau staff member; and Martin Robin, who was to teach Margaret Sinclair before Trudeau married her. In the discussions about Canada in Ghana, Anglin and others argued that federalism should be highly centralized, but Trudeau countered that federalism, even in an “industrial age” that needed strong government, should be seen as a counterweight to the deadening effect of bureaucracy and a tool to bring government “closer to the people.” Porteous, who was one of the creators of the wildly successful McGill revue Spring Thaw, recalls that Trudeau was shy but completely unpredictable. He insisted on breaking the anglophone monotony by taking a side journey to neighbouring francophone states.⁵³

Trudeau’s activities among English Canadians attracted little notice at the time in the intense debates going on in Quebec, where the Rassemblement and the Union des forces démocratiques were now cast to the side as the forces of opposition to Maurice Duplessis gathered behind Jean Lesage. Trudeau’s position became more difficult. Political scientist Léon Dion criticized the negative tone of Trudeau’s analysis of Quebec politics and his excessive reliance on arguments about the past. Others were less polite. The Nouvelles illustrées began to make Trudeau a regular target. Its gossip column mocked his “election” to the presidency of the Rassemblement, implying with considerable truth that the organization was elitist and its elections meaningless. In an anonymous letter to the editor of the same journal on April 25, 1959, the author urged that Trudeau should be sent on the first interplanetary journey so he could establish his new party on the moon, where “it would be more useful.”

Trudeau’s efforts seemed increasingly quixotic and even a waste of his considerable talent. In the McGill Daily of October 31, 1958, “Jean David” commented on the Democratic Manifesto. “Generally,” he wrote, “the author is considered to be a brilliant man but to many [he] still remains a dilettante. This means that Trudeau himself has a limited influence but his ideas are usually taken into account.” The effect of the manifesto, he continued, would be tied to the reaction of Quebec political leaders. At McGill a few months later, Trudeau once again said that because the “people” have not been taught democracy, they should create a completely new party. It was, he said, “the only way out.”⁵⁴ A few days later in a debate on Radio-Canada, Jean Drapeau firmly rejected the Union des forces démocratiques as an effective tool to bring down Duplessis.⁵⁵ Trudeau could brush off student complaints and even Drapeau, but now he received a blow that troubled him more: his friend from childhood, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, attacked his Democratic Manifesto.

Vadeboncoeur had worked closely with Trudeau on all his projects, hailing his return to Quebec in Le Devoir in 1949 as a giant step towards a new day in Quebec. His anti-nationalism was even stronger than Trudeau’s in the early 1950s, and both spoke regularly, if vaguely, of revolution. He was the butt of Trudeau’s pranks, which he fully reciprocated. You remain, he wrote in 1955, “the one guy in the world I love, with whom I love to laugh and be reckless.” Although Vadeboncoeur was a lawyer by training, a labour activist by profession, and a successful essayist by nature, he was perpetually short of money. Trudeau lent him funds when he needed them, as he had since they had both begun classes at Académie Querbes decades before. From the beginning it had been a strong, mutually supportive friendship.

In 1959, however, Vadeboncoeur became exasperated with his old friend. First in a labour-socialist publication and then in Le Devoir, he gently attacked the Union des forces démocratiques and Trudeau. “You’ll find,” he began, “that the analysts who are too clear-sighted sometimes make the greatest errors. The famous options that are proposed by that deeply penetrating spirit—that is my oldest friend, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau—are of such a kind.” Soon after, in Le Social Démocrate and then in Le Devoir on May 9, he denounced the Union as “le Club de M. Trudeau,” an elitist bunch who were undermining the possibility of socialism while ineptly promoting the Liberal Party. It was a hard punch, and it hurt Trudeau.⁵⁶ However, old friends can take blows, and Trudeau took it in good spirit.

When Pierre Vadeboncoeur made his attack in Le Devoir, Trudeau was away on another long trip around the world. Then events in Quebec moved quickly in his absence: the strike by producers at Radio-Canada in mid-1959 resulted in a political earthquake that turned René Lévesque and others into neonationalists. Trudeau himself later identified Radio-Canada as the strongest force in breaking through the media monopoly and the elite’s fears, both of which had protected Duplessis’s autocracy. The strike, therefore, had dramatic implications for the flow of free political information in the province. During this crisis, on September 7, Maurice Duplessis died unexpectedly after a series of strokes. The tattered remnants of the Rassemblement, along with critics such as Vadeboncoeur and Casgrain, accused Trudeau of departing just as the battle lines formed, but, in truth, he was not ready for further battle. His letters and his papers at the time suggest that he was eager to escape the infighting and quarrels in Quebec as the various factions jostled for position and the old fortresses of church and tradition began to crumble. Moreover, he had not expected Duplessis to die. After all his years in power, few did.

When Trudeau left Quebec at Easter 1959, he hoped to enter China once again, though he also intended to revisit old haunts and discover new vistas. Unlike his journey a decade earlier, he did not set off this time to be a vagabond student wandering the world with a knapsack. He was forty years old now and he travelled first class most of the way, staying in fine hotels such as the St. James in Paris and Hotel Mount Everest in Darjeeling. Yet, in spirit, he remained a passionate observer and a curious student. In Vietnam he noted the presence of police on every corner and despaired that the country might remain forever divided. In India he discovered a passion for politics among the people, and the historic Hindu openness to sexuality. He visited the gorgeous, erotic friezes in Kathmandu, Nepal, where the women are portrayed with their limbs spread apart and their “sex open,” and animals bear “the perfect replica of the human sexual organs of normal size.” He marvelled at the “ménages à trois” or even four. The “glorification du sexe” was part of their life, he wrote, perhaps with some envy. On one street he saw men walking with their hands on their genitals and wondered what it meant. The secular Congress government of India was trying to promote birth control, but the Catholic Trudeau questioned whether it would “modernize” the country or simply create neuroses.

Moving on to Persia, he noted how the forces opposed to the Shah detested the Americans, whose discreet presence as consultants there was considerable among the military. But he was most impressed by the changes in Israel, a country he described as a miracle. From the deserts of the Middle East, the Israelis had created a land of “greenness, of gardens, flowers, wheat fields, cotton, and corn” and a society of healthy children and well-dressed citizens. Although he detected a touch of chauvinism among the Israelis, he compared them favourably with the surrounding Arabs. He noted in his diary that he believed they were not expansionist and were willing to accept the status quo.⁵⁷

Trudeau later attended an International Socialist Congress in Hamburg, Germany, where he met Moshe Sharett of Israel and Guy Mollet of France. Throughout his trip he called on prominent individuals in business, politics, and academic life. Before he left, he had asked his numerous contacts for appropriate letters of introduction. One of the most curious was a letter from Rex Billings, the general manager of Belmont Park in Montreal, who, on April 9, 1959, wrote: “The bearer of this letter, Mr. Pierre E. Trudeau, is a director of Belmont Park, and is travelling abroad on a combined business and pleasure trip. He will be visiting various amusement parks in the course of his travels, and any courtesy extended to him will be appreciated.”⁵⁸ He was not able to visit China, although two prominent English Canadians who were sympathetic to Chinese Communism—Margaret Fairley, a Toronto intellectual, and James Endicott, a controversial United Church minister—attempted to obtain an invitation for him. His mother was pleased they did not succeed. She worried throughout the trip: Don’t stick “out your neck to reach China—and have your passport confiscated or get into an international mess,” she warned. “You have seen enough excitement in your life—besides you won’t be able to run as fast as you once could—remember your sore foot.”

In the end, he spent most of the time in Europe, where he bought a new Mercedes for the family. He also bought gifts: pearl earrings for Carroll Guérin, amber earrings for “Alice,” pearls for “Ada,” a silver pin for “Nicole,” an unspecified gift for Mireille G., a pin and scarf for “Kline,” and some perfume and a “pin” for Grenier, the family chauffeur. He bought a black and gold brocade jacket in Hong Kong for himself, and then spent 225 dollars or pounds for a suit made by William Yu at the celebrated Peninsula Hotel. On September 9 his mother wrote to him that the Mercedes had arrived in Montreal missing one door.⁵⁹

Back home, his oldest friends were puzzled; his colleagues, often frustrated. Who is Pierre Trudeau? they asked during the political ferment of the summer and fall of 1959. Who were his friends? What did he want? His mother knew how much he wanted what she termed “success.” She resented Alec Pelletier when she told her in May how “her husband” kept Pierre informed during his absence—“not that I know of anything very important,” she added, as “my entourage is the passive kind I suppose.” In fact, Gérard Pelletier was rarely in touch with Trudeau^* and seems not to have known what occurred in his personal life all that well.⁶⁰

Meticulous as always, Trudeau kept a record of the letters he wrote during his long absence. It appears that he wrote ninety-two letters. Pelletier and Jacques Hébert received two each, one less than his mother and the same number as Suzette and her family. Carroll Guérin, his most frequent but far from exclusive female companion, received eleven. Numerous other women, including Nicole Morin, Micheline Legendre, Marie Sénécal, Madeleine Gobeil, and others whom he met in Europe, received a single letter. The rest of the list intrigues because it illustrates how Trudeau had forged new ties with English Canadians and Americans who were almost completely absent in his lists from the late forties and early fifties. Among them are John Stevenson of The Times, Morris Miller of Saskatchewan, Lionel Tiger of McGill University, Ron Dare of the University of British Columbia, and the historian Blair Neatby.⁶¹

Trudeau arrived home in the fall just before Maurice Duplessis’s promising successor, Paul Sauvé, unexpectedly died. He was succeeded by the unimpressive Antonio Barrette, who set off a stampede among the reformers to support the Liberal banner. Trudeau seemed at a loss as René Lévesque, journalist Pierre Laporte, constitutional lawyer Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and several reform leaders announced they were joining Jean Lesage to fight the next election. While others prepared for this stunning political change, Trudeau happily busied himself with plans for an astonishing canoe trip from Florida to Cuba. As Lesage began to electrify audiences, and René Lévesque dazzled viewers on television, Trudeau set off from Key West for Cuba with two friends. According to the Florida newspapers, Trudeau, Valmor Francoeur, and Alphonse Gagnon, a millionaire businessman from Chicoutimi, had developed “a unique method of propulsion. While one man paddles in conventional fashion, the second lies on his back and paddles with his feet. The third rests and they switch off after two-hour hitches.” Unique it surely was, but wildly dangerous too: three-foot waves drenched them thirty miles out and a shrimp boat pulled them back to the Florida shore on May Day, 1960. Although the trip had no ideological connection, it became part of the lore of Trudeau’s links with Fidel Castro, whose rebels had recently taken Havana. In interviews, Trudeau said nothing about politics, but he apparently told the Miami Herald he was thirty-nine, then dropped the age to thirty-six for the Key West Citizen. Like the trip, it was all good fun.⁶²

But his absence was not whimsical—it may have been deliberate. The platform of the Lesage Liberals had become increasingly neonationalist during the first months of 1960. Jean Lesage’s campaign emphasized provincial autonomy and began to speak of a special status for the province. Trudeau became very troubled as the rhetoric of nationalism, which he had so long deplored in Cité libre, became the lifeblood of the Liberal campaign, particularly in Lévesque’s television appearances. The Liberals tried to woo Marchand, but there is no evidence they asked Trudeau—the president of the Rassemblement, the coeditor of Cité libre, the author of the Democratic Manifesto, and the founder of the Union des forces démocratiques—to become a candidate. He was, perhaps, wounded—or maybe he sensed it was wise to bide his time. Certainly, he made himself difficult to contact—a small canoe in the middle of the ocean could not have been more impossible to reach—as the forces of opposition to Duplessis swelled behind Lesage and his team.

Once the Cuban canoe escapade was over, Trudeau returned to Montreal and wrote an editorial in Cité libre that appeared just before the election of Jean Lesage on June 22, 1960. It argued, grudgingly, that the Liberals were to be preferred to the Union nationale, but he persisted in claiming that his Union des forces démocratiques would have been a better alternative than the Liberal Party in the creation of a new government. He was especially scornful of the Parti social démocratique and the Civic Action League for their refusal to join actively with the Union. He debated with his young friend Madeleine Gobeil whether it would be “complicity” to support the Liberals.⁶³

On June 22 Lesage won a surprisingly narrow victory over the battered Union nationale. It was, and remains, a landmark in the recent history of Quebec, one that opened dams that had been long closed. Unlike most of his colleagues and friends, Trudeau was not taken at the flood.

* Unfortunately, Trudeau did not keep detailed notebooks in the fifties as he had on earlier travels. Nevertheless, his brief notes show that he used travel to develop his political views. In Europe in the fall of 1951, he draws the lesson from the study of different party systems that bureaucrats should be more effective and concludes that Quebec’s greatest need is an independent and competent public service. He did keep a laundry list of his extended 1951–52 travels that broke down items into nine fascinating categories: cities, architecture, adventure, national traits, theatre, music, art, antiquities, and scenery. The architecture category was brief and peculiar: Italy’s elegant Villa d’Este and Le Corbusier’s work in Moscow and Paris. More interesting was music: Der Rosenkavalier at the Berlin Opera, Pablo Casals at the Prado, a Sudanese ensemble in the desert near Khartoum, and pygmy drums in the Congo. Adventure was typical and amusing: “sleeping outdoors in equatorial forest and raging baboons; tracking elephants & buffaloes; riots in Cairo; swimming [in the] Bosphorus; and contradicting Politbureau.” Voyage 1951–1952, TP, vol.12, file 4.

* Falardeau wrote a long letter to Scott saying he had asked Trudeau to “make more accurate and historically objective his references to P. Lévesque and to the Faculty of Social Sciences [at Laval]” and to “tone down the aggravating accent of his statements concerning such people as M. Minville etc.” Scott and Falardeau both emphasized editorial perfection because of the difficulty they had experienced in finding a publisher, and because they expected the book to be severely criticized. When it was finally finished, Falardeau wrote to Trudeau that they should learn important lessons from the whole affair: “That would require another book in itself.” Falardeau to Scott, Sept. 7, 1955; and Falardeau to Trudeau, July 27, 1955, and April 13, 1956, TP, vol. 23, file 16.

* So do the comments of CCF activist Thérèse Casgrain, who wrote to Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas on April 16, 1955, asking if “Pierre Trudeau, whom you have met and who is one of our extremely promising young Canadians,” could attend the federal-provincial conference with the Saskatchewan delegation. Saskatchewan Archives, Douglas Papers, collection number 33.1, vol. 671.

* Gérard Pelletier asked Jean Marchand, who had attended Laval, where Father Lévesque was establishing a school of social science, what he had learned in university: “He gave me the shortest possible answer: ‘Nothing.’” For his part, Pelletier described his college education as “rather anemic.” Gérard Pelletier, Years of Impatience, 1950–1960, trans. Alan Brown (Toronto: Methuen, 1984), 75.

* In his study of race and the Canadian courts, James Walker has clearly shown that Quebec was not out of step with other Canadian jurisdictions in restrictions on the rights of Asians, Jews, and Blacks. In 1954, when the federal government revised the Immigration Act, Minister of Finance Walter Harris explained that “the racial background of our people would be maintained within reasonable balance; and … we would avoid an influx of persons whose viewpoint differed substantially from that of the average, respectable, God-fearing Canadian.” The Globe and Mail thought Harris went too far but, revealingly, dissented weakly: Who are we being protected from, it asked, “Arabs, Zulus, or what? No one seriously proposed taking immigrants from any part of the world save Western Europe.” Quoted in James Walker, “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1997), 248.

* The writer Jean Le Moyne was invited to one meeting with eighteen participants in Charles Lussier’s basement. “In the dim light I could see two small bottles of wine at each end and a Dominican priest, a man both austere and paternalistic, sitting in their midst … The discussion was extremely mature but it was so solemn and ponderous I wanted to escape. Our meetings [at Le Relève] were very different. We would have a wonderful dinner with much laughter and talk about books. The end of the evening would find us under the table replete with good wine and great ideas. I was thinking about this [contrast] when the Dominican suddenly asked me where I was coming from, and I answered him facetiously, ‘From under the table, Father.’ Nobody knew what I was talking about, of course, but if they had known, I had the feeling they wouldn’t have laughed.” Jean Le Moyne, quoted in Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, Trudeau and Our Times, vol. 1: The Magnificent Obsession (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 64–65.

* Trudeau regularly jousted with Laurendeau and Le Devoir. In 1957 he was invited to a conference of “Amis du Devoir” and asked to be a keynote speaker. He began by citing André Gide’s response to the question, Who is the greatest French poet? “Hugo, hélas!” If one were asked what is the best French newspaper in Canada, he continued, the answer should be “Le Devoir, hélas!” Le Devoir, Feb. 4, 1957.

* A year later, Trudeau debated the question on radio and argued that the grants were “against the constitution and the spirit of federalism.” TP, vol. 25, file 4.

* Historian Michael Behiels was scathing in his criticism: “The procedural strategy had a bad taste of boy scout amateurism and a large dose of political naïveté. When a public manifesto was signed finally by twenty-one ‘eminent’ political personalities in April 1959, only one Liberal, Marc Brière, endorsed the document, and he had not been mandated by the party.” See his Prelude to Quebec’s Quiet Revolution: Liberalism versus Neo-Nationalism, 1945–1960 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), 254.

* A few weeks later Trudeau’s garrulous behaviour caused one real loss. According to Nouvelles illustrées on December 27, 1958, Trudeau was an “excellent combatant” in a judo competition, but he was disqualified because he “talked too much”—a characteristic not expected of a brown belt in judo.

* Scott’s biographer Sandra Djwa says, correctly, that Scott had a considerable influence on Trudeau. She also suggests that Scott’s use of the term “just society” was the source for Trudeau’s later political slogan. She admits, however, that tracing the influence is difficult. She points out that in his memoirs, Trudeau refers to T.H. Green and Emmanuel Mounier as important influences in the forties but does not mention Scott. Moreover, she continues, “There is no reference to Scott’s role in Quebec in the Memoirs, nor to their joint Mackenzie River trip. Scott’s name appears only once in a brief paragraph on the CCF.” Although Trudeau admired Scott, his papers suggest that Scott’s influence was perhaps more personal than intellectual. Sandra Djwa, “‘Nothing by halves’: F.R. Scott,” Journal of Canadian Studies 34 (winter 1999–2000), 52–69.

* In his memoirs, Pelletier says that Trudeau “barely read daily papers.” Yet his papers are crammed with clippings from all the major newspapers, and he found even obscure references to himself in the tabloid press.