POLITICAL MAN
On an early spring morning in Westmount in 1963, René Lévesque, Gérard Pelletier, and André Laurendeau were still at the Pelletiers’ table at 2 a.m. Trudeau and Jean Le Moyne had left earlier. Out of cigarettes but still brimming with thoughts, Laurendeau and Lévesque had a last cup of coffee. Suddenly, an explosion ripped through the silence outside. “It’s a FLQ bomb,” said Laurendeau, blaming the Front de libération du Québec, a loose organization created earlier that year to bring about an independent Marxist state through violence. “No, no,” Lévesque retorted, “it’s an explosion in the Métro,” the subway system then under construction in Montreal. Laurendeau disagreed: “I recognize the sound. They planted one not far from my place last month.” Alec Pelletier descended the stairs and was decisive: “It’s a bomb.” Another explosion, and this time even Lévesque began to doubt his Métro explanation. The FLQ found mailboxes an easy target—where else could they drop a package and not look suspicious?
The three journalists—one now a Cabinet minister, another an eminent editor, the third a political and media icon—set out in search of a big story. With Alec still cloaked in her elegant dressing gown, they soon found a grocery store whose windows had shattered, leaving a wall of cigarette packages completely exposed: “What luck, René,” Alec declared. “Just help yourself.”
With the scent of smoke and the thrill of the chase intense, the men set off to find the source of the other explosion. Oblivious to danger, they drove close to a mailbox where another bomb lay, but, fortunately, that explosion would come later in the morning. As crowds milled around the splintered glass, Pelletier kept an astonished silence. Lévesque was divided in his response, critical, yet admiring: “You’ve got to hand it to them—they’re courageous, those guys.” Laurendeau became reflective: “It’s incredible,” he mused. “When I was twenty I used to call on a girlfriend in this part of town. I never dreamed that such things could happen here. Absurd, isn’t it?”1
In fact, 1963 was often an astounding year—of mailbox bombs, the rising FLQ, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After Kennedy’s death in the Dallas afternoon of November 22, Laurendeau, Trudeau, Pelletier, Lévesque, and Marchand had the last of their meetings that evening. Lévesque mourned the president’s death profoundly, “as if the crime had wiped out a member of his family.” Trudeau was analytical, pondering other American presidential assassinations, while Laurendeau deplored the violence that, in the argot of the 1960s, seemed as American as apple pie. Their different reactions to Kennedy’s death reflected their varying reaction to the equally stunning changes in Quebec. Throughout the year, René Lévesque had been making explosive comments about the future of Quebec within Canada. He had begun to reflect publicly about Canada being composed not of ten provinces but of two nations. He often mused about the possibility of separation if the federation failed to reform itself. He startled an admiring Toronto audience when he described Confederation as an “old cow” that had to change or Quebec would leave. When asked by the television host Pierre Berton whether he would be greatly troubled if Quebec left the Confederation, Lévesque replied: “No, I wouldn’t cry long.” The controversial comments and casual quips that boldly flirted with separation did not escape the notice of Laurendeau and Trudeau.2
Laurendeau was deeply troubled. Though nationalist in his views, he was nevertheless becoming identified as a “federalist” committed to the reshaping of the Canadian Confederation. In September 1961 he had bluntly stated his position in Le Devoir: “Independence? No: a strong Quebec in a new federal Canada.” Soon after, as John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government crumbled in Ottawa, Laurendeau called for the creation of a commission that would study and report on the creation of a new bilingual and bicultural federation. Diefenbaker said no, but Liberal opposition leader Lester Pearson endorsed Laurendeau’s proposal in one of his speeches.
When Pearson took office in April 1963, he moved quickly to create the commission. After some fumbling, as his weak Quebec colleagues recommended people who commanded no support in Quebec, Pearson turned to Laurendeau and asked him to co-chair the commission he had originally proposed. Laurendeau hesitated at first but consulted widely. Lévesque gave him many reasons to refuse and one odd reason to accept—the “big bang” that Laurendeau’s quick resignation from the commission would cause. Still, after a shouting exchange in which Laurendeau declared he was not a separatist and Lévesque replied, “Neither am I,” Quebec’s most popular politician resigned himself to Laurendeau’s chairmanship. In July, Laurendeau met Pearson and accepted the position. He also convinced Jean Marchand to join him as one of the commissioners.3 The commission hired Michael Oliver of McGill University and Léon Dion of Université Laval as co-directors of research, and they created an ever-swelling research team* for, perhaps, the most significant royal commission in Canadian history.4
Trudeau watched these events warily, particularly since he worried about Laurendeau’s avowed nationalism. The commission asked him to undertake a study of the role of a “Bill of Rights” in protecting cultural interests.5 He accepted initially but put it aside as the demands of his university courses, his journalism, and the family business increased after 1963. His mother’s health was deteriorating, the manager of the family’s business had died, and Tip was now often absent abroad or at his country retreat. He had developed a reputation as a fine architect, but he and Pierre do not seem to have been close after they left Brébeuf. When Trudeau was abroad, his list of correspondents indicates that he seldom wrote to Tip although their affection was still obvious to all when they were together. He saw Suzette often at their childhood home in Outremont, and they bantered as they always had. She was a shrewd financial manager, and Grace and Pierre both valued her advice. Her role at the centre of the family intensified as her mother’s health began to fail quickly in the sixties. Trudeau took over more responsibility for the management of finances and, when he was in Montreal, met weekly with his advisers. They included the lawyer Don Johnston, who later joined his Cabinet. Trudeau’s “office” was a spare room with a metal desk, filing cabinets, and bare floors located on the burgeoning rue St-Denis. No doubt Trudeau enjoyed lunch in the nearby bistros much more than the accounting details.6
Pelletier’s demanding work as editor of La Presse meant that he had less time to devote to Cité libre. And the journal’s troubles were many. In the 1950s Trudeau had been a rare voice on the left; now many others had leapt over him, shouting Marxist slogans and scrawling revolutionary mottoes on school corridors and street signs. The intellectual boundaries that Cité libre had established in the early 1950s expanded quickly in the early 1960s, to the great distress of the founding editors. In 1963 these boundaries burst. Young members of the Cité libre team quit to establish the strongly leftist and nationalist journal Parti pris, but not without bitter farewells. In Cité libre itself, the twenty-five-year-old journalist Pierre Vallières argued that the founders should realize that the torch should be passed to a younger generation. The original team recognized the strength of the sentiment and, despite Jacques Hébert’s doubts, made Vallières “editor” of Cité libre in 1963.7 In the summer issue, not long after the night of the mailbox bombs, Vallières wrote an article on Cité libre and his generation. He began with the journal’s stirring 1950 declaration of purpose. Those once-young men who had made that declaration were, he cruelly pointed out, “now forty or over.” They had fought worthy battles against Duplessis and for the workers in the dark 1950s, but now they felt no need to engage in a “dialogue with the younger group.”8
In February 1964 Pierre Vallières published another article in Cité libre which discussed a speech Walter Gordon, the federal finance minister, had given in Toronto alerting the audience to the “revolution” in Quebec. Vallières scorned this term as a description of events in the province since 1960 because, he argued, there could be no revolution without the destruction of bourgeois capitalism. It was time to choose the streets instead of the salons of Westmount, to prefer action to dreams. Gérard Pelletier, who had known Vallières in 1960 when he was “a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a mystic, something of a dreamer,” deplored this revolutionary rhetoric. He recognized the creativeness of the revolutionaries, the seriousness of their work, and the important literary efflorescence occurring on the left. Their aims, however, were unacceptable: “a separatism wholly secular and anti-religious, a totalitarian socialism installed by violence, with the inevitable civil war provoked by the systematic agitation of a revolutionary party.”9
Trudeau was not as polite as Pelletier in his rejection of the incendiary new dreams of youth. A generation earlier, he had mused about revolution himself. When the Catholic Church and Senator Joseph McCarthy excoriated and pursued Communists with terrifying and destructive zeal, he had dared to visit Russia and China and to declare himself a socialist. Now, in May 1964, he rejected any link with the Parti pris editors, who had, in their first issue, declared the founders of Cité libre “our fathers.” He refused to acknowledge these self-declared offspring and attacked Vallières and the new nationalist socialists as separatist “counter-revolutionaries.” Deep “upheaval” was characteristic not only of revolutions but also of counter-revolutions, he warned. Think of fascism and Nazism, of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Salazar:
It cannot be denied that they all claimed to be serving the destiny of their respective national communities; further, three of them called themselves socialists. But who would call the whole of their work revolutionary? They upset a great many institutions, they even opened the way for some material progress; but they abolished personal freedom, or at least prevented it from growing; that is why history classes them as counter-revolutionaries.
And so I get fed up when I hear our nationalist brood calling itself revolutionary. Quebec’s revolution, if it had taken place, would first have consisted in freeing man from collective coercions: freeing the citizens brutalized by reactionary and arbitrary governments; freeing consciences bullied by a clericalized and obscurantist Church; freeing workers exploited by an oligarchic capitalism; freeing men crushed by authoritarian and outdated traditions.
That revolution had never occurred, although “around 1960, it seemed that freedom was going to triumph in the end.” There were the victories of Roncarelli in the freedom-of-speech case, the retreat of the church from dogmatism, and the entry of previously barred professors into universities. In 1960, he exulted, “everything was becoming possible in Quebec.”
A whole generation was free at last to apply all its creative energies to bringing this backward province up to date. Only it required boldness, intelligence, and work. Alas, freedom proved to be too heady a drink to pour for the French-Canadian youth of 1960. Almost at the first sip it went at top speed in search of some more soothing milk, some new dogmatism. It reproached my generation with not having offered it any “doctrine”—we who had spent the best part of our youth demolishing servile doctrinairism—and it took refuge in the bosom of its mother, the Holy Nation.
But the dogmatism of the cleric was giving way to the “zealots in the Temple of the Nation,” who, like the authoritarians of the past, “already point their fingers at the non-worshipper.” Indeed, in its April 1964 issue, Parti pris had acknowledged that there was “a necessary totalitarianism,” while attacking Trudeau not for his ideas but because he was rich. Trudeau responded angrily.
He began with a discussion of his own previous and contemporary writings that had praised revolutionary figures in Russia, Algeria, and Cuba. “Genuine revolutionaries” such as Lenin, Ben Bella, and Castro had stressed “collective freedom as a preliminary to personal freedom” in situations where personal freedom had “scarcely been protected at all by established institutions.” That was not the case in Quebec: “True, personal freedom has not always been honoured in Quebec. But, I repeat, we had pretty well reached it around 1960.” Those who now talked of revolution had not been in the vanguard: “Thanks to English and Jewish lawyers (ah, yes!), thanks to the Supreme Court in Ottawa, personal freedom had at last triumphed over the obscurantism of Quebec’s legislators and the authoritarianism of our courts.”
Every week, Trudeau complained, “a handful of separatist students” told him they were “against democracy and for a single-party system; for a certain totalitarianism and against the freedom of the individual.” Like the most traditional and reactionary individuals, they believed that they possessed “the truth” and all others must follow them. When others didn’t, they turned to violence, all the while claiming persecution. In their privileged places “in the editorial rooms of our newspapers … at the CBC and the National Film Board,” he said, “they lean with all their weight on the mass media.” Others went underground to plant bombs and became “fugitives from reality.” The separatist “counter-revolution” served mainly to protect the interests of the francophone “petit-bourgeoisie” and the professional classes, who would have diplomatic limousines, offices in the new national bank towers, and tariffs to protect their fragile businesses. “Rather than carving themselves out a place in [twentieth-century industrial society] by ability,” Trudeau sneered, “they want to make the whole tribe return to the wigwams by declaring [their] independence.”
As this privileged minority gained more status, he warned, society would lose. Algerian rebel Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was a book that militant separatists “kept beside their bed.” Trudeau cleverly turned to Fanon to support his assault on the nationalist separatists. In Fanon’s own words, “A national bourgeoisie never ceases to demand nationalization of the economy and the commercial sectors … For it, nationalization means very precisely the transfer to the native population of the favours inherited from the colonial period.” Trudeau acidly concluded: “Separatism a revolution? My eye. A counter-revolution; the national-socialist counter-revolution.”10
Trudeau’s angry eloquence erupted not only in this article but also in Cité libre’s editorial meetings, where he directly confronted the nationalist and often separatist tendencies of the new editorial team. Pierre Vallières, whom Pelletier also employed at La Presse, was a particular target as he became more vigorously separatist and flirted romantically with revolution and the FLQ. In his remarkable autobiographical tract, Les Négres blancs d’Amérique, written after he became an FLQ leader committed to the violent overthrow of the state, Vallières described his encounters with Pelletier and Trudeau. Although they rejected his article for a special 1962 issue on federalism, he said, they encouraged him to write for Cité libre. Pelletier may even have believed that hiring him in 1963 to write for La Presse and later to edit Cité libre would restrain his separatist inclinations. Vallières also believed, probably correctly, that his references to the French liberal philosopher Emmanuel Mounier appealed to them and that they did not really understand his broader arguments.
Vallières’s views were initially opaque. They became more transparent and unacceptable during 1963, and his efforts to reach out to earlier Cité libristes, notably Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who had become a champion of the literary separatists, upset the founders. Then, in March 1964 Vallières and other new voices used Cité libre to attack the journal’s former editors directly. Some articles mocked them, including a clever satire by the poet and future separatist politician Gérald Godin comparing federalists and separatists to Hurons and Iroquois. In Vallières’s opinion, Trudeau and Pelletier believed they had created “a monster.” The young, for their part, suddenly realized that “their former idols had become old so quickly.” Vallières and several others resigned immediately after this issue appeared. He founded a new review, Révolution québécoise, that embraced socialism, separatism, and violence. Two years later, he was in jail charged with terrorism.11
Trudeau might quarrel with the young, but he himself remained youthful in his taste and demeanour. He wore turtlenecks at the university, raced his Mercedes through the streets, and sought out younger friends. He was an active member of the anti-nuclear movement and an early opponent of the Vietnam War. On campus, he wore the dove peace symbol as early as 1962, long before it became ubiquitous. Yet he did not share the eccentric François Hertel’s fascination with, and approval of, those “who play with dangerous and different ideas” because he believed that the ideas of Vallières and his colleagues were irresponsible and destructive. Perhaps he had once had such notions, as Hertel insinuated in his reply to Trudeau’s 1964 attack on him in Cité libre after the priest seemed to call for the assassination of André Laurendeau. But the mingling of separatism with nationalism and, more recently, with violence represented to Trudeau a horrid return to an earlier world of extreme nationalism that had thankfully disappeared. Where Vallières saw echoes of the streets of Algiers or Hanoi, Trudeau saw the Munich beer halls of the twenties and the Nuremberg rallies of the thirties. The gulf between them widened quickly in 1964. His long-time companion Madeleine Gobeil, now living in Paris but still fully engaged in Quebec debates and making a name as a writer, told Trudeau that she would publish in Cité libre because it would identify her as anti-separatist. To publish in Parti pris, which was much more strongly literary in character, would lead everyone to believe she was a separatist.
Both journals had drawn the line. Trudeau, along with Pelletier and others, once again reorganized Cité libre with the intention of making it a journal of opinion that was leftist, secularist, but most decidedly not separatist. The journalist Jean Pellerin remained as editor after Vallières left, and the McGill philosopher Charles Taylor, for whom Trudeau had worked in the 1963 federal election when Taylor was an NDP candidate, became very active in the journal. Yet serious divisions remained: Charles Taylor, Jean Pellerin, and others were sympathetic to nationalist arguments and to the NDP’s support for the concept of “two nations.” Pelletier and Trudeau were increasingly not.
These passionate debates and differences shaped later understandings of what happened in Quebec in the sixties. Was there a profound rupture from the past at the time? What happened to the French Canadian and when did the Québécois appear? What was the meaning of the Catholic past and the socio-political culture of the thirties and forties for the new society that emerged in the sixties? And, above all, what was Quebec’s place in Canada?
On the last question, Trudeau had become increasingly clear: Quebec’s place lay within a Canadian federal state where individual rights were well defined and the cultural rights of French-speaking Canadians were guaranteed. He differed from André Laurendeau and from his New Democrat friends in his vehement opposition to the concept of “two nations”; he, in contrast, emphasized constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. While accepting the existence and importance of the French language and culture in North America, he rejected a political definition of “nation” based on “ethnicity.” Toronto historian Ramsay Cook, who knew him well in the early sixties, recalled that Trudeau came to believe that democracy in Quebec—a goal he had long cherished—faced one huge danger after the Lesage victory: nationalism. “For Trudeau,” Cook wrote, “nationalism was conformist force founded upon conservatism and insecurity. At worst it was totalitarian. Moreover, in the Quebec context, nationalism acted as an emotional substitute for reasoned solutions to real problems.” It was, therefore, the young who would lose the future as they sought out some “imaginary Jerusalem” rather than more immediate and useful goals.12
In his study of memory and democracy in Quebec, social critic Joseph-Yvon Thériault insists that Trudeau, as an intellectual and a politician, must be understood in the context of Lord Durham’s famous report that described two different “nations” in the 1830s. Of Trudeau, he wrote, “His thought as much as his political deeds is structured as a critique and a transcendence of French-Canadian nationalism.” In this respect, Pierre Trudeau was very much “a Quebec man of his generation.” Like Durham, he identified the quarrel of the French-Canadian people as “a debate about principles between the defence of nationality and liberal values.” He believed that the “defence of nationality” had prevented the development of “a true political pluralism” among French Canadians.13
In the 1960s Trudeau’s thinking on nationalism and politics was increasingly framed in the language and concepts of political science, although he resisted academic and intellectual strait-jackets. He became even more interested in what a new friend, the French journalist Claude Julien, termed “the American challenge”—and, indeed, there were echoes of Julien and American social science in the call for functional politics that Trudeau and several other Montreal intellectuals issued in 1964. Julien, a foreign correspondent for Le Monde who had been educated at Notre Dame University in Indiana, believed that the technological achievements of contemporary America threatened to leave Europe a fading, second-class continent. On his frequent trips to Paris, Trudeau visited Julien, who—like him, a Catholic on the left—kept wondering what the leftist and statist doctrines would mean for economic progress.
In his attack on the “separatist counter-revolutionaries” that year, Trudeau lamented the price the young in Quebec had paid for ignoring “the sciences and the techniques of the day: automation, cybernetics, nuclear science, economic planning, and whatnot else.” Instead of facing the future, a few built bombs, others wrote revolutionary poetry, and the world moved past them. The poets, painters, authors, and songwriters were once again raising the banners of revolution in the coffee houses, the clubs, the streets, and in literary reviews, but, Trudeau believed, many of the younger generation were dangerously closing both their borders and their minds. While he welcomed the progressive reforms of Vatican II, the youth around him mostly ignored the changes and rejected religion itself in favour of alternative secular substitutes.
To get a better perspective on what was happening, Trudeau sought out new voices. The University of Montreal economist Albert Breton shared the same concerns as he and Julien did. They had lunch almost every week in a campus restaurant, where Trudeau revealed a “sweet tooth” along with his extraordinary knowledge of federalism. He could quote The Federalist Papers verbatim. Breton, who went on to become one of the world’s leading economists in the study of federalism, claims that he “first learned about federalism from [Trudeau] during those lunches.” Trudeau began to attract other young intellectuals—such as the lawyer Marc Lalonde and the public servant Michael Pitfield—because of his generosity in expressing his own ideas. They also had their good times and laughed easily together: on one occasion as a few of them journeyed to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in the Maritimes, they decided to indulge in the local delicacy and ordered lobster at a roadside restaurant. Bitter was their disappointment when it came in sodden lumps from a can.14
Separatism itself did not lead immediately or always to a break in personal relations; when Trudeau visited Paris, for instance, he always saw François Hertel, who had openly embraced separatism at the beginning of the sixties. He even welcomed the new nonconformism of the youth in Quebec, which expressed itself in a riotous abundance of facial hair, T-shirts, and mini-skirts in Montreal’s lively bars and bistros. Moreover, like the rebellious young, he retained a Parisian’s disdain for American foreign policy and materialism, particularly the Vietnam War and nuclear policy. The problem was not the nonconformity of the young—he relished and personally represented individualism in taste—or the sixties amalgam of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He much enjoyed the first, tolerated but did not participate in the second, and danced superbly to the third. Rather, it was the conformity of the young that bothered him enormously, particularly at the university, where the students were overwhelmingly separatist. Most serious, in his view, was their unwillingness to consider alternative views and, in the case of the FLQ, their deadly seriousness. “Would Quebec miss the turn?” he had asked in 1960 on the eve of the Liberal victory. As he listened to students with their dreams of an “imaginary Jerusalem,” he feared that, once again, it had.
Trudeau therefore shared Julien’s sense that American energy and technology were transformative and that Canada was fortunate to share a continent with such a dynamic force for change. In the same vein, Quebec was blessed to be part of the prosperous and vital Canadian federation. Despite doubts about the influence of American investment that he had first expressed in the 1950s, he even accepted parts of Julien’s strained argument that Canada, with its openness through that investment to American technology and creativity, was “Europe’s last chance.”15
Trudeau no longer read much Quebec fiction—which increasingly played to Quebec nationalism. Gérald Godin, Hubert Aquin, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Godbout, and others who formed the cultural base of the nationalist and separatist efflorescence of the mid-sixties all annoyed Trudeau in their use of the colloquial “joual,” their polemical rejection of the past, and, above all, their profound political irresponsibility, as he saw it. Although chansonniers like Gilles Vigneault and Félix Leclerc touched his romantic core, he reacted uneasily to the marriage of the cultural avant-garde to separatism and its flirtation with violence. In a different sense, he opposed the attempt by academic sociologists, notably by his old friend Marcel Rioux (now a separatist), to treat francophone Quebec residents sociologically—a path that led directly to the distinctiveness that, in his view, found political expression in separation.16
Following the “purge” at Cité libre and the publication of the statement on functional politics, Trudeau became increasingly distressed about the more explicitly nationalist direction of the Lesage government. He simultaneously worried that Lester Pearson’s government in Ottawa was badly advised on constitutional matters and too weak to respond to the aggressive demands for jurisdiction and dollars from Quebec City. In his articles and in letters or comments to some of his closest friends—Carroll Guérin and Madeleine Gobeil, both now in Europe, and Marc Lalonde and Jacques Hébert—he expressed despair about the state of Canadian affairs and fretted over the best way to respond. Although he had never much admired Pearson, he had come to believe that Lesage was actually a weak leader who had lost control of his government. What should he do in these circumstances?
Trudeau realized that columns in Le Devoir or rants in Cité libre reached few of the workers in shops, in factories, or on farms who would make the final choice on the issue. Confrontations with his students in the classroom were also unsatisfying. He began to place his hope in television, which was entering a golden age of public affairs broadcasting. In 1964 he tried to negotiate an agreement with the CBC to become a host for the Inquiry series. The negotiations failed. Carroll Guérin summarized his sad lot in the early winter of 1965: “Correcting exams must be a huge bore; but I guess it is part of the price one has to pay for teaching. What a pity the TV thing proved to be a flop. It goes to show that our apprehensions were not without reason. It is a pity that entertainment is placed before ideas—but what can you expect from Toronto.”17
Laurier LaPierre, a McGill University historian, became the Quebec intellectual who charmed English Canadians in 1965, alongside Patrick Watson, on This Hour Has Seven Days, a Sunday night program that shocked both the government and its audience. But Trudeau became a frequent participant in seminars and other academic gatherings as Canadians tried to understand what the tempests of change would bring. In 1964 the federal Parliament bitterly debated a new flag for Canada, one that would not bear the traditional British symbols. Carroll Guérin detested the design; Trudeau dismissed it as a trifle. In October 1964 riots broke out as the Queen made the last royal visit to Quebec City, not long after another English institution, the Beatles, made a more successful imperial progress across North America. The times, the American folk artist Bob Dylan rightly declared, were “achangin.’” But not always happily, it sometimes seemed, for Trudeau. His enemies appeared to be multitudinous, and Malcolm Reid summarized their reasons in his book about the literary and political radicals of mid-sixties Montreal:
What Partipristes could not forgive Trudeau, what seemed to them false and treacherous in his demolition of theocracy, was his cool, assured tone. How could he live in the smothering of liberty and not cry, not scream, not scribble on walls, not take to drink or dynamite? Such calm could come only from a basic cosiness with the very English money which paid for this reign of darkness, an Anglo-Saxon confidence that all would be straightened out when the French-Canadians learned engineering, business administration and behaviorist labour relations.18
The critique was unfair, but not entirely incorrect. Even if Peter Gzowski had described him—admiringly—as an “angry young man,” Trudeau had learned to control his internal rage and to present himself to the world with a “cool, assured tone.” In his self and in his politics, he was determined to be “functional,” just like the architectural style—lean, international, and modern. And that style increasingly impressed those who came into contact with him, in person, through the press, or on television. Trudeau, a leading francophone professor told Ramsay Cook in 1964, was “the most talented intellectual in Quebec,” but, alas, one whose talents were not fully exploited.19 That situation was about to change.
The fourth year of the Quiet Revolution began with the Armée pour la libération de Québec, one of the several fringe separatist groups, announcing its intention of liberating the province by force within two years—a declaration punctuated on January 30,1964, when an ALQ group stole a truckload of arms and ammunition, including anti-tank missiles, from the armouries of the Fusiliers de Montréal. Further raids on defence installations occurred on February 15 and February 20. Editorialists debated whether the Queen should stay home as rumours of a murder plot circulated. “Are we savages?” Lorenzo Paré asked in L’Action. During the royal visit, the police struck the separatists down with truncheons. The Globe and Mail reacted as the separatists hoped when it declared that “Canada has walked to the edge of crisis and in many ways its performance has been appalling.” Trudeau had no love for the British monarchy, but he agreed: events were spinning out of control.20
In 1964 Abbé Lionel Groulx, one of Trudeau’s early mentors, published Chemin de 1’avenir, “the road to the future”—a future that he claimed lay somewhere between outright independence and associate-state status. Immediately, the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste came out in support of an associate state in a document written by the well-known historian Michel Brunet. Such a tract would likely have gathered dust in the archives except for its endorsement on May 9, 1964, by René Lévesque, who declared that associate-state status should be negotiated “without rifles and dynamite as soon as possible.” Lévesque did not back down, and soon even Jean Lesage seemed to affirm most of his arguments. Such demands can easily be dismissed today as empty political rhetoric, but Trudeau and others recognized that the Lesage government had gathered together an impressive group of bureaucrats who were more than a match for their federal counterparts. The Ottawa men were reeling under the continual expansion of Quebec City’s demands.
The Pearson government had come to office committed to creating a European type of welfare state in Canada. Unlike Europe and even the United States, Canada had no “social security” system in 1963. Only a fraction of high school graduates went to university, compared with the system of mass university education that had developed in the United States after the Second World War. Pearson’s ambitions, which were inscribed in the Liberal Party platform after the historic “Thinkers’ Conference” at Kingston, Ontario, in September 1960, directly challenged the distribution of powers in the British North America Act, in which health, education, and social welfare generally were the responsibility of the provinces. Despite the opposition of many provinces, including, of course, Quebec, the Pearson government, once elected, decided to press forward with a fundamental restructuring of the role of the state in Canadian life. The Lesage government proposed the same for Quebec.21 Not surprisingly, the governments clashed.
The clash, however, was sometimes productive—in many ways a justification of Canadian federalism, as Trudeau argued at the time. The province of Quebec had independently developed a strong proposal for a social security or pension system. The federal government was compelled to react. After difficult and bitter negotiations, the Canada Pension Plan and the Quebec Pension Plan were created through a system in which Quebec was allowed to “opt out” and receive a larger share of “tax points.” Judy LaMarsh, Pearson’s minister of health and welfare, threatened to resign over the issue, but pleas to her that invoked “national unity” concerns obtained her silence—for a while.* Trudeau welcomed the new social spending, but was disconcerted by the clumsy and irregular character of the decision-making and by the precedents being set.
What astonished Trudeau more were the moves by the Quebec government to obtain an independent presence in international affairs. What had begun, sensibly, as the creation of a francophone Canadian presence in the French world, with the establishment of Quebec offices in Paris and elsewhere, had become a path whereby Quebec would attain an independent right to sign treaties and to conduct international relations in areas of provincial competence. More troubling was the presence in Charles de Gaulle’s government of numerous officials who encouraged Quebec in these ambitions. Trudeau’s old acquaintance Paul Gérin-Lajoie, a leading constitutional scholar, was the political and intellectual leader of the Quebec foray onto the international stage, and others, notably Le Devoir journalist and nationalist Jean-Marc Léger, rallied intellectual opinion behind the government’s ambitions.
In January 1965, while the two men were both relaxing in Florida, Lesage told Pearson he had lost control of his government: he felt like a man holding on to the tail of an enraged bear. Public opinion polls indicated that Quebec separatism was no longer an idle dream but, potentially, a political movement with the support of somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of Quebec voters. As the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism travelled through the country, commissioners heard tales of francophones who had lived in Ontario, Manitoba, or elsewhere who had been denied jobs and told to “speak white.” These incidents sparked many comments and bred resentment. André Laurendeau’s diary of the commission’s tour included such details as the young francophone living near Windsor, Ontario, who told how her French accent caused her problems even in an area with a historic and substantial French presence. When she was trying to rent an apartment, a friend told her not to make the calls because of her accent. Across Canada, the Commission rubbed against old scar tissue from the earlier wounds of conscription during the war, school language battles, and the rebellion of Louis Riel. Laurendeau also recounted how one commission member, Gertrude Laing, spoke with a young “Anglo-Canadian” who admitted that “he hated the French, that several of his friends felt the same way,” and that he did not “believe at all in the task we are involved in.” When pressed why, he said he had the impression that Quebec was “destroying the Canada he loves.”
Polls taken by the Calgary Herald and the Winnipeg Free Press indicated that their readers believed the commission’s work was harmful—an opinion Conservative leader John Diefenbaker shared. Not surprisingly, the commissioners decided they must sound an alert by issuing a “preliminary” report. Published in February 1965, that report declared, memorably, that “Canada, without being fully conscious of the fact, is passing through the greatest crisis in its history.”22
After the commissioners rang this alarm, Cité libre published an anonymous attack on the report and on Laurendeau himself. Laurendeau was convinced that Trudeau was its principal author. He learned his suspicions were correct when Jean Marchand confirmed them and Trudeau later “partially” agreed. Trudeau’s papers do contain a draft of the text.23 It was primarily the commission’s method that concerned Trudeau. As historian J.L. Granatstein observed, “the commissioners had gone beyond the traditional role of a royal commission in collecting data and offering recommendations; instead, they had involved themselves in the process and had become, in fact, animateurs.” Trudeau, Marc Lalonde, and the others who had called for a functional politics thought that Laurendeau remained trapped within the nationalist womb—especially given his musings about a special status for Quebec. They feared that the federal Liberals’ Quebec representation was simply too weak to counter the challenge from Quebec City and, at the same time, deal with the commission’s demands.
In the spring of 1965, however, national public opinion polls began to shift towards the Liberals. John Diefenbaker’s protracted and histrionic opposition to the maple-leaf flag had angered many Canadians, and the Quebec Conservative Party had disintegrated. Despite some doubts about the bi and bi commission, there was a general expectation that its report would work to the Liberals’ advantage. Many in the party therefore pressured Pearson to call an election
Unfortunately, at this moment, scandals and corruption were dogging the Quebec Liberals.24 The weak Quebec ministers were a problem in Ottawa. Guy Favreau, the minister of justice, had been unable to secure provincial acceptance for the Fulton-Favreau proposals on the reform of the Canadian Constitution. Now his health was quickly failing and, in the spring of 1965, he became embroiled in a scandal surrounding a notorious drug dealer, Lucien Rivard.* Pearson had already lost his parliamentary secretary, Guy Rouleau, because of the scandal and the firebrand Yvon Dupuis because of an apparent bribe.25 Now two more Quebec ministers, Maurice Lamontagne and René Tremblay, had become major political liabilities because of their alleged failure to pay for furniture from a bankrupt Montreal furniture dealer. The scandals, the astute journalist Richard Gwyn wrote in 1965, “resulted from a series of compromises made in the name of political expedience, which permitted what Le Devoir memorably termed ‘the Montreal Liberal trashcan’ to stand outside the back door of Parliament a good half-decade after it should have been removed.”26
At the very moment when Quebec had become the Liberal government’s most challenging issue, its francophone voices were discredited. Gérard Pelletier declared that Pearson’s path led him into a “perpetual cul-de-sac,” no matter what direction he turned. Journalists in French and in English cruelly portrayed Lester Pearson, who had privately impressed André Laurendeau and the other commissioners with his sensitivity and shrewdness, as a hopeless bungler. In January 1965 Pearson had met with Lesage and implored him to come to Ottawa, suggesting that the post of prime minister would be his reward. Lesage told him the timing was wrong: he was in the third year of his mandate in Quebec, and an election would normally fall in the fourth year. Pearson knew that the federal Liberals could not wait so long. Their sophisticated American pollster Oliver Quayle told them they must call an election in the summer of 1965, while Diefenbaker was still the Conservative leader. Moreover, in July 1965 Pearson managed to get nearly all the premiers to agree to a “medicare” plan, thereby giving the Liberals the progressive issue they needed to attract NDP votes. Despite strong opposition from many prominent Liberals, including Defence Minister Paul Hellyer and the wily political veteran Paul Martin Sr., the Liberals had already raised expectations of an election.
Pearson, who stood accused of indecisiveness, could hold off no longer. After a late-summer tour of the West, he returned to Ottawa on September 7, 1965, and called an election. Three days later, at a Montreal press conference in the Windsor Hotel, the three friends Pierre Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier, and Jean Marchand together announced that they would stand as Liberal candidates. For the Liberals, it was a coup; for Quebec politics, a shock.
Jean Marchand was the prize: a trade union leader as Liberals battled with the NDP for labour votes; a bare-knuckled debater who could go “toe to toe” with Réal Caouette’s Créditistes; and a popular figure with the Lesage government, including René Lévesque. But the fall of 1965 was Trudeau’s time too, just as it was Marchand’s and Pelletier’s. Marchand’s role in the labour movement had become more difficult, and he had resigned as the head of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU) in the spring, knowing that politics offered an alternative. In that same spring, the board of directors of La Presse had fired Pelletier as editor.27 Politics beckoned all three men to the Liberal fold almost at once. Trudeau was elated—his mood reflected the excitement of his new venture, his sense of mission at this troubled time in Quebec’s and Canada’s history, and the realization, at last, of his plan to be a political man.
Jean Marchand had considered running provincially or federally with the Liberals since 1960. When he decided not to run in 1963 because of Pearson’s stand on nuclear weapons, he stepped aside quietly. Such was not the case with Pelletier, whose editorial opinions at La Presse denounced the decision and continued to criticize the scandals that plagued Pearson’s minority government. It was Trudeau, however, who rankled Liberal veterans most. They forgot neither his bitter denunciation of Pearson’s decision to accept nuclear weapons nor his frequent attacks on Liberal MPs as “imbeciles” or “trained donkeys.” Accordingly, Pearson was informed that Vadeboncoeur, not Trudeau, was the author of the notorious phrase “the defrocked prince of peace.” Technically, the explanation was valid, although Pearson apparently was not told that Trudeau liked the phrase so much that he had chosen it to introduce his own caustic essay on Pearson in Cité libre. Fortunately, there were no copies of the review in Pearson’s library. According to Jean Marchand, the powerful national party organizer Keith Davey tried to convince him that he should run alone only days before the election was announced. But he stood firm and insisted that the others must run too. He had “great confidence,” he told Davey, “in Mr. Trudeau’s mind and in Pelletier’s judgement.”
On September 9 the decision could be delayed no longer. At Guy Favreau’s request, Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau met with him at a suite in Montreal’s Windsor Hotel, along with Maurice Lamontagne and party organizer Robert Giguère. Maurice Sauvé apparently came without invitation. The meeting began at 8:00 p.m. and lasted until 3:00 a.m. Lamontagne frankly argued against the candidacy of Trudeau and Pelletier, telling them that things would be “very tough” and they would receive a cold welcome in Ottawa. But Trudeau maintained his “jolly mood” through it all. At 4 p.m. the next day, September 10, the three, quickly dubbed the “Three Wise Men” by the English press and “Les trois colombes”—the Three Doves—in the French press, announced that they had suddenly become Liberals and would stand as candidates in the next election.28
Trudeau remained the coy political mistress and took some time to find a constituency. According to journalist Michel Vastel, Trudeau dreamed of representing Saint-Michel de Napierville, where his ancestors had dwelt. It provoked uproarious laughter in the editorial rooms as journalists pondered the image of “the intellectual of Cité libre, the bourgeois of Outremont” going from door to door among the farms on the South Shore of the St. Lawrence. More astutely, the young Liberal Eddie Goldenberg realized Trudeau’s remarkable political appeal when he came just after the announcement to speak to students at McGill University. He reflected on Greek philosophy, analyzed democratic thought, and, to Goldenberg’s initial consternation, spoke unlike any politician he had ever heard. But the students were entranced. With Trudeau, it seemed that politics at last might be different.29
After much commotion, the party finally found Trudeau a seat in Mount Royal, a constituency that was rich, strongly Liberal, largely anglophone, and with a significant Jewish population. McGill University law professor Maxwell Cohen had positioned himself to run there, so Pearson intervened himself to persuade a disappointed Cohen to step aside. The excellent House Speaker Alan Macnaughton, who had held the seat since 1949 with remarkable majorities in recent elections, gracefully made way for Trudeau. However, the popular physician and veteran Victor Goldbloom was unwilling to allow the party’s favourite a clear run at the nomination. His reluctance may have emerged from Trudeau’s casual appearance when he came to a meeting with Liberal organizers driving his Mercedes sports car and wearing “an open-collared sports shirt, a suede jacket, a beat-up old peaked hat, muddy corduroy slacks, and sandals.” He was sent home to change before the sceptical party faithful could encounter this strange new political beast. Trudeau mused about dropping out, claiming he did not want to run against Goldbloom, who was a “good man.” The result, Marchand said, was “the most awkward convention I have ever seen, with Goldbloom saying that Trudeau was the best candidate, and Trudeau saying that Goldbloom was the best candidate.” At the insistence and with the blessing of Pearson’s organizers, Trudeau became the candidate.30
Marchand had to calm Trudeau once more when he learned that his friend Charles Taylor, for whom he had campaigned in 1963, would be his NDP opponent. Taylor had participated in a joint attack in Cité libre in reply to Pelletier’s and Trudeau’s October 1965 explanations for their decision to run for the Liberals. Their argument for joining the Liberal Party amounted to a blunt statement that they wanted to be politicians to carry out their policy aims, and only the Liberal Party offered them the possibility of placing their hands on the levers of power. “There are two ways in which one can become involved in public life,” they wrote: “from the outside by critically examining the ideas, institutions, and men who together create political reality; or from the inside itself by becoming a politician oneself.”31 It was, as Taylor pointed out, the type of expedient argument that Trudeau and Pelletier had so often condemned.
Moreover, they were both self-declared voices on the left, and their decision weakened the NDP, whose popular leader, Tommy Douglas, was attracting much new support. Their sudden switch to the Liberals stunned the Canadian left, but it also encouraged many. Ramsay Cook, who had been an eloquent voice interpreting Quebec politics and thought among English-Canadian intellectuals, wrote to Trudeau on September 10, 1965: “Today’s announcement of your intention to seek a nomination in the next election astonished me … While my heart is with the NDP, I would gladly do anything I could to help you.” He, too, had become disillusioned by the NDP’s two-nation policy. Trudeau’s old colleague Maurice Blain—not so willing to help—was disappointed that they had abandoned the political left to work in “a traditional party subservient to capitalism, identified with anti-democratic institutions, and committed to electoral opportunism.”32 These comments worried Trudeau, but Marchand convinced him he should not let them get to him and simply knock on doors to win the votes.
On November 8 Trudeau won Mount Royal with a margin of 13,135 votes, less than half of Macnaughton’s margin of 28,793 in 1963. It was not a smashing victory, but he had a safe seat for the remainder of his long political career, always with large margins of victory. The government also won re-election, but once again the cherished majority eluded Lester Pearson as Diefenbaker’s campaign skills carved up the Liberal vote, especially in the West, and scandals continued to plague the Liberals in Quebec.* It was, Liberal organizer John Nichol later said, “a long, long way to go for nothing.” Marchand entered the Cabinet immediately as the minister of citizenship and immigration, with the promise that he would soon become the minister of a new Department of Manpower. Once Pearson named him his senior Quebec minister, Marchand relished the task of “cleaning up” the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party.
Pelletier and Trudeau took their place on the back benches, probably because some penance was appropriate before the other Liberal MPs could be expected to accept the freshly minted Liberals. Politically, it was wise to dampen expectations because the trio had caused a whirlwind in Quebec, especially in intellectual circles where there was, in Blain’s words, “an emotional reaction.” As he perceptively remarked just after the election, the three “had not so much embraced a new career as set out on a mission.” Detested by separatists, distrusted by neo-nationalists and the left, they came to represent a shift in the political landscape in Quebec and, perhaps, in Canada. For Pierre Vadeboncoeur, this mission slowed the swelling momentum leading to an independent socialist Quebec. Laurendeau, who approved of their switch, nevertheless believed that “their decision dealt a major blow to ‘democratic socialism’ in Quebec, and killed a lot of hopes.” Years later, Bob Rae, the former federal NDP member of parliament and Ontario premier, said that their emergence on the federal scene as Liberals “ended the dream of a socialist Canada under a New Democratic government.”33
Such judgments belonged to the future in the fall of 1965 when, in Pelletier’s words, “many people thought that Trudeau and I would cross the aisle in Parliament after a month.” Of course, they did not. In 1992 Trudeau told Michael Ignatieff, who had supported his campaign for the leadership in 1968, that he had decided “not to make party options too soon.” Rather, he advised, you should complete your philosophical formation first because, “once you join a party, it’s hard to switch. You have the whole history of friendship and everything else.”
Even before the supposedly decisive meeting on September 9, 1965, Trudeau had told Madeleine Gobeil that he was making “the big jump.”* More tellingly, his confidante Carroll Guérin wrote to him in October, just before the election. She regretted leaving him at the airport, “though I am quite glad that you are engrossed in politics now; probably because I’m safely removed from the front now! But I felt I was leaving you to something very vital (to put it mildly), and not walking off while you returned to a way of life that you must admit was something of a dead end.” She summarized so many intimate conversations in those two brief sentences. Pierre, whom she loved profoundly, had found his place. “With hugs,” she concluded her letter, “even if you are in the Liberal Party.”34
The Liberal Party was scarcely congenial for a backbencher arriving in Ottawa in the winter of 1965–66. Walter Gordon, who had strongly urged Pearson to have an election, offered his resignation after the defeat. To Gordon’s surprise, Pearson accepted it. With Gordon’s departure, the left or reformist wing of the party was suddenly weak, particularly when the more conservative Mitchell Sharp became the new minister of finance and the decidedly conservative Robert Winters, after he had divested himself of his numerous company directorships, minister of trade and commerce.
What this reorganization meant, the eminent journalist and editor Claude Ryan wrote in Le Devoir, was that the Cabinet had “two tiers”—the first a group of senior ministers who were “the real masters,” and the second a group of juniors, who would have to prove themselves. The “masters” came almost entirely from Ontario; in Quebec, only Marchand might be called upon “to enter the ‘inner sanctum’ where the big decisions are made.” Ryan was correct in his assessment that nearly all the Quebec ministers were on the lower tier; what he did not realize was the extent of the mandate Pearson gave Marchand to “do that [cleanup] job” in Quebec they both deemed essential. Trudeau and Pelletier, in Marchand’s words, supported him but “were not directly involved or personally involved” in the political house-cleaning. They were backbenchers “like the others,” though already an aura surrounded them.35 There were also the doubters and the believers.
The influential Toronto Globe and Mail greeted the entry of Marchand, Pelletier, and Trudeau as potential bulls in a Liberal store filled with fragile china. For his part, Pearson’s lead Quebec minister Guy Favreau, though willing to accept their entry, was so upset that he took “a long ride on his motorcycle at high speeds” to work off his frustration—no doubt something Pierre had done in the past himself.36 Of the three, Trudeau was the least well known; the firing of Pelletier from La Presse amid rumours of plots by Lesage and large business interests had attracted attention even in English Canada. Trudeau was not listed in the English-language Canadian Who’s Who for 1965, and almost none of his writings were available in English. When he first arrived in the fall, Ottawa reporters treated him as an exotic species whose sartorial tastes as much as his intellectual prowess set him apart from his parliamentary colleagues.* Not for the first time, the media attributed to him a lower age.
Yet difference and mystery intrigue. In a book on Canadian nationalism published in 1966, the well-known University of Toronto historian Kenneth McNaught famously drew attention to Trudeau: “It was to stem the now common habit of looking upon and treating Ottawa as a foreign power that this brilliant and essentially non-political sophisticate plunged into the icy waters of federal politics in Quebec.” McNaught, a leading socialist activist and the biographer of J.S. Woodsworth, feared Trudeau’s impact on his NDP but welcomed his voice in Ottawa and Quebec:
For his pains he has been smeared as a vendu, and there is little doubt that he shares what I have called the English-speaking view of Canada. His political fate will likely be the political fate of Canada. Nor should anyone question the agony of his decision, for it involved further crippling the struggling Quebec wing of the NDP, which is the party that best represents Trudeau’s social thought. His decision that the Liberal party—the party which flirts most openly with American continentalism—is yet the party which alone might avert the imminent culmination of racial nationalism was the measure of his fears for Canada.37
In Quebec, Jean-Paul Desbiens, whom Trudeau and Cité libre had honoured in 1960 for the publication of his notorious attack on the Quebec education system, similarly declared in a letter to Trudeau that he and his colleagues represented for Canada its “last hand of cards.”38
Trudeau, wisely, appeared eager to lower expectations. During the election campaign he told reporters that when he became a candidate, he was not offered a Cabinet post. Moreover, he said, “I made it clear I did not want such a post before anyone had the chance to offer me one.” Blair Fraser, the national reporter Trudeau had known well since his youth, wrote profiles of Trudeau, Pelletier, and Marchand shortly after the Cabinet was formed in December 1965. The article rightly identified Marchand as the key player. “Trudeau and Pelletier,” Fraser wrote, “are quite content as backers of Marchand, with no special ambitions.” He reported that Trudeau found the all-candidate debates surprisingly enjoyable and that “his wry humour went down well.” He also rightly identified some of the baggage that Trudeau carried with him to Ottawa: he had “never been obliged to work for a living”; his “English-speaking mother (Le Devoir insists on spelling his name Elliott-Trudeau)”; and, “gravest of all … his habit of speaking his mind.” Some details aside, the article, oddly, has one wildly-off-the-mark analytical flaw—Fraser’s assertion that “the fact that he is a well-to-do bachelor” was something “which women voters seem to resent.”39
Immediately after the election, while others flew to Ottawa to pursue positions, Trudeau, true to form, went off to Europe on a ski trip. While he was there, Pearson decided to offer him the post of parliamentary secretary to the prime minister. Trudeau promptly declined, probably because he was wary of working closely with Pearson when he had little knowledge of him and his office or simply because he worried—correctly—that too rapid promotion breeds jealousy.
Marchand was livid. He had promoted Trudeau for the position of parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance and was pleasantly surprised to learn that Pearson wanted him for the Prime Minister’s Office. Never close personally to Trudeau and exasperated with his moral dithering about running against Victor Goldbloom for the Liberal nomination and then against Charles Taylor in the election, he called Trudeau in Europe. In the sanitized version of the heated conversation that appears in his memoirs, Trudeau says that he told Marchand: “Give me time to get settled, to do my homework. You know I don’t like to go into anything unprepared.” Marchand responded caustically: “We didn’t come here to refuse to work, Pierre. What brought us here is that there’s a job to be done, and we have to grab every opportunity to do it.”40 Trudeau could not refuse his colleague, and so he became parliamentary secretary to Lester Pearson—the man he had criticized regularly since his first encounters with him as a young bureaucrat in Ottawa in 1949.*
What he saw of Pearson in the first months of office confirmed some of these doubts. The failure to win a majority government profoundly depressed the prime minister: on election night his face seemed frozen when he spoke on television; he took no questions and told reporters, “It’s been a hard two months—I think I’ll go home and go to bed.” Probably he slept little that early morning of November 9 as he contemplated the resignation he would offer to his Cabinet in the morning. It was, as expected, rejected, but he left the meeting determined to have a new team. Walter Gordon left quickly, along with prominent party officials such as Keith Davey and Jim Coutts. Tom Kent, a dominant intellectual presence in Pearson’s office, became Jean Marchand’s deputy minister in the new Manpower Department. Pearson insisted that different faces were essential, even if the old ones were, in some cases, those of friends or of politicians wrongly caricatured as corrupt. Maurice Lamontagne, who had been Pearson’s major Quebec adviser since opposition days, was an early casualty as Pearson told him personally that it was time for him to “get out.” René Tremblay suffered the same fate, and Guy Favreau was retained in the minor post of president of the Privy Council. There his health continued to weaken, his East Block office remained empty, and his secretaries rarely saw him until he died in 1967. Maurice Sauvé, correctly distrusted by his colleagues as the source of “leaks” to the press about the government’s internal troubles, retained his minor Cabinet post of minister of forestry, but his influence was much diminished. Apart from Jean Marchand, the sole important francophone was Minister of Justice Lucien Cardin—and, as another scandal would soon reveal, his task was beyond his capabilities.41
Later, when asked about these times, Trudeau said that “what surprised our little gang … is how easy it was to get yourself in a position of importance in a … historically established party … We knew that if we could get the people to support our ideas, some of the old guard would say: ‘Well, these guys can win with new ideas, so let’s win.’”42 What made their success possible were two major factors: the discrediting and disappearance of the “old guard” (Lamontagne dated from the St. Laurent era, and Favreau and Tremblay from 1963); and the priority that Pearson and the Canadian public gave to the Constitution and the Quebec issue after the election of 1965.
Trudeau sensed the opportunity immediately. André Laurendeau, who did not “feel” like congratulating Trudeau on his victory, met him at two cocktail parties in early January. He remained the jolly soul he had been in November in the Windsor Hotel, and Laurendeau “was struck by his good spirits, and his energy: it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him so up.” Marchand told Laurendeau that the Liberal MPs were finding it difficult to accept Pelletier, whose barbs they remembered well and whose column on being a candidate during the 1965 campaign reflected extremely poor political judgment. Trudeau was different: he was “wonderfully successful. He astounds English Canada.” And, Marchand concluded, “I’m willing to bet my shirt that within a year Pierre will be their big man in French Canada, eclipsing all the others.”43
Fortunately and fortuitously for Trudeau, the first big issue he had to address was the Constitution. Already, before he entered politics, he had worked intensely on constitutional questions with his friends Marc Lalonde, Michael Pitfield, and groups affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress in Quebec. Now, the unwillingness of the Lesage government to support the Fulton-Favreau process for constitutional revision in 1965 and 1966 brought deadlock and crisis. For Lester Pearson, it was a bitter disappointment. In February 1965, for example, he had confided to his close friend the journalist Bruce Hutchison that his greatest accomplishment was in the area of “Canadian federalism” and that he was now “totally devoted to national unity.” This issue became the bond between Trudeau and his political chief: he could grasp the bloom of fresh opportunity from this nettle of failure. And, as he gained success, his respect for Pearson slowly grew.
The opening came from Premier Jean Lesage, who, anticipating a provincial election, separated the provincial Liberals from the federal Liberals. The federal Liberals immediately arranged a convention for their Quebec branch, where constitutional policy became the central issue. Jean Marchand, realizing he must establish his authority at this convention, turned to Trudeau for assistance on policy questions. Already Lesage’s hesitancy had cast doubt on the federal government’s earlier approach to Quebec, and the January 20, 1966, Throne Speech in Ottawa had set out a “harder” line in its approach to constitutional revision and to provincial demands, stating that it would “exercise great care in agreeing on joint programs with the provinces in which all provinces do not participate.”
Now, at the convention, Trudeau, under Marchand’s tutelage, brought forward resolutions for the Quebec Liberal Federation that reflected his own similar hesitations about “any kind of special status for Quebec.” Intellectually, he dominated the gathering. His argument that no major revision of the British North America Act was needed was generally accepted, as was his rejection of “an independent Quebec, or associate status, or special status, or a Canadian common market, or a confederation of states.” He also argued for bilingualism within the federal government and the importance of a Bill of Rights that would enshrine individual rights across the country. Although Claude Ryan in Le Devoir dissented from Trudeau’s “honest but dubious” propositions and his “cold logic,” the power of Trudeau’s ideas and the centrality of his role in federal politics in Quebec were firmly established within months of his arrival in Ottawa.44
Trudeau’s early success in federal politics occurred at a time of chaos in Ottawa. The CBC’s popular television series This Hour Has Seven Days (which had considered Trudeau as a host) had introduced a confrontational form of interviewing that caught most politicians unprepared. In one program just after the election, Justice Minister Lucien Cardin revealed the name of George Victor Spencer, a postal clerk who had been fired because he was suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. Ruffled, he went on to say that Spencer would not be charged but would be under surveillance for the rest of his life.
With those careless words, Cardin upset both civil libertarians and anti-Communists and made himself a target for John Diefenbaker, who fancied himself, with some justice, as the advocate of both. When the House returned in January, Cardin faced Diefenbaker’s relentless attack. Quebec Liberals already detested Diefenbaker and blamed him for the destruction of Favreau, Lamontagne, and Tremblay—again with some justice. The Cabinet had decided in January that there would be no inquiry into the charge, but Diefenbaker and the NDP demanded that George Victor Spencer’s curious case required investigation. Some members of the Liberal caucus, including Trudeau and Pelletier, began to question the government’s stand. Bryce Mackasey, an outspoken Montreal MP, rose in the Commons to call publicly for an inquiry. On the way to Pearson’s office, apparently to offer his resignation as parliamentary secretary, Mackasey encountered Trudeau, who, in Mackasey’s recollection, told him, “I’ll go with you [to Pearson’s office] and I’ll resign as well, because I felt what you felt.” Pearson gave them a “good tongue-lashing,” telling them if he wanted their resignation he would ask for it.45 It was, for Trudeau, a good lesson.
More lessons soon came as Spencer’s case magnified the government’s and the prime minister’s weaknesses. On March 2 David Lewis of the NDP told the House that Spencer himself wanted an inquiry—a clear repudiation of Pearson’s statement the previous day that no inquiry was needed. Diefenbaker went for the jugular as only he, the most effective parliamentary debater of his generation, could do. Two days later, sensing that the beleaguered justice minister stood alone, he pressed the attack, hinting that the government was concealing various security breaches in the past and the present. It was mudslinging at its worst, and Cardin responded in kind, warning Diefenbaker that he was the last person to give advice on security cases. Pearson, who had come into the House, strongly applauded his minister. Diefenbaker pointed at him and shouted: “Applause from the Prime Minister. I want that on the record.” Cardin misunderstood, thinking that Diefenbaker was demanding the name of the security case, and he stupidly blurted out “Monseignor.” He had meant to say “Munsinger.” Gerda Munsinger was a German immigrant to Montreal who had carried on affairs simultaneously with a Soviet diplomatic official and Pierre Sévigny, the associate minister of national defence in Diefenbaker’s government. Pearson and Favreau had threatened Diefenbaker earlier with revelation of the Munsinger affair if he persisted in his bitter personal attacks on Quebec ministers.* Thus began the only serious sex scandal in Canadian political history and, more significant, the departure of Lester Pearson from Canadian politics.46
In a minority government and with his major advisers of the past now absent, Pearson made the fatal error of reversing his position and agreeing to the inquiry, even though three senior ministers, including Marchand, had defended Cardin’s stand against an inquiry in the House.47 Once again it seemed that Pearson had abandoned a Quebec minister under siege. Jean Marchand, according to one account, went over to Pearson’s desk after he announced the inquiry and said: “If you ever do to me what you’ve just done to Cardin, all hell will break loose.” It soon did. Lucien Cardin went home to Sorel for the weekend, decided he must resign, returned to Ottawa, and handed a letter of resignation to the prime minister. Pearson refused to open it. On the Tuesday, Trudeau attended the Quebec caucus. The members were furious with this abandonment of Cardin and almost voted for a motion of censure directed against Pearson, an action that would force the prime minister to consider resignation. Marchand told Cardin that he would resign with him, as would some other francophone Quebec ministers. Under pressure, Cardin stayed on; and Pearson stumbled through a sordid inquiry into the security risks of Gerda Munsinger’s lively sex life.48
Trudeau shared the anger of his Quebec colleagues. He drew important impressions from the political chaos he experienced during his first three months in Parliament. First, he confirmed his impression that Lester Pearson was a weak but well-meaning leader. Second, he agreed with his Quebec francophone colleagues that their ministers did not receive the support they needed to confront the challenges of Quebec nationalism and separatism. Third, he strengthened his opinion of the House of Commons as a chamber where “trained donkeys” brayed and “imbeciles” roared. One day when Trudeau appeared for a vote wearing leather sandals and a foulard, Diefenbaker thundered denunciations at him for showing such disrespect for the ancient sartorial rules. He paid little attention to the House in the remainder of his first year and never developed the affection for the Lower Chamber that parliamentarians ranging from Wilfrid Laurier to Henri Bourassa to John Diefenbaker had done. In later years, Trudeau made some memorable speeches in the House, and his quick repartee made him highly effective in Question Period. But he was not a born gladiator in the political arena of the House of Commons.
After Trudeau’s death, Pierre Vadeboncoeur defended his old friend, with whom he had bitterly disagreed since the mid-1960s, against charges that he was haughty and conceited. Quite the contrary, he said, Trudeau was often unsure of himself and was not “a natural tribune.” As a politician, he became successful through his talents, but even more through a determined will to control “with precision, his actions and his attitudes.” Because he was not a natural in the political battle, he sometimes adopted a pugnacious approach that was “contrary to his own more simple and authentic character.” These thoughtful comments illuminate Trudeau’s unusual political persona when he went to Ottawa in 1966—one exuding strength while simultaneously retaining a deep reserve that could become a beguiling shyness or, unexpectedly, a burning anger.49
Although Trudeau became Pearson’s parliamentary secretary, they seldom worked together that year. In his own memoirs, Pearson admits that “Trudeau had neither very much to do nor the opportunity to learn very much in my office.” Trudeau, in his own memoirs, states that he expected “some modest parliamentary chores and some pencil-pushing.” Instead, Pearson sent him “running around the world.”* In April he attended a meeting in Paris of the newly created Canada-France Parliamentary Group, one of the forums that allow backbenchers to travel and be rewarded. Herb Gray, a young MP from Windsor, also attended the Paris meetings, where, he recalls, Trudeau startled the Canadians and the French alike with his detailed knowledge of Paris, Europe, and Africa, and with the stunning blonde woman who accompanied him to some of the formal events. Trudeau seemed at home in Paris, a perception validated by the “contact” list from his 1963 trip, which bears over forty names, including such eminent intellectuals as Jean Domenach of L’Esprit and the distinguished and currently fashionable philosopher Paul Ricoeur—and, inevitably, numerous single women.50
This parliamentary association was important because of the French and, more particularly, President Charles de Gaulle’s interest in Quebec nationalism and separatism. Many French journalists travelled to Quebec at this time, attracted by the liveliness of the political debate, the literary and musical efflorescence of Montreal and Quebec—Michel Tremblay and Marie-Claire Blais, Félix Leclerc and Monique Leyrac were suddenly receiving raves in the French press—and their own government’s increasing willingness to deal directly with a Quebec administration that had completely lost its suspicion of republican and atheist France. Quebec responded warmly to this embrace, establishing a “délégation générale” in Paris and undertaking a series of ministerial visits where Lesage and his ministers received treatment normally reserved for representatives of the most important sovereign states. Meanwhile, the Canadian ambassador, Jules Léger, Trudeau’s old friend from Ottawa days, was treated contemptuously by de Gaulle, whose government signed a Quebec-France cultural entente in February 1965 that Le Magazine Maclean termed “the entry of the state of Quebec on the international scene.”
Although the struggle between Ottawa and Quebec City to limit Quebec’s “international” activities had many comic aspects, including the measurement of flags and even battles between limousines to lead processions, there is no doubt that some French officials, principally in the president’s office, joined in intrigues to promote the independence movement in Quebec. Just as Canada had gained independence through its signature on fishing treaties and its appointment of “ministers” to foreign countries, so Quebec’s international activities in Paris and, increasingly, in the former French colonies could well have led to political sovereignty. On this matter, Pearson and Trudeau strongly agreed. Trudeau therefore represented Canada at an international convention of French jurists and, later, wandered through five African countries to promote Canadian interests in the new “Francophonie”—a French Commonwealth being promoted by Senegal president Léopold Senghor, a poet who very much impressed Trudeau.51
Before he entered politics, Trudeau had criticized Quebec’s efforts in the international arena, and he agreed to chair a group of legal experts who were considering how Canada should respond to these challenges. Two Pearson advisers whom Trudeau admired greatly, Marc Lalonde and Michael Pitfield, were part of the group, along with the undersecretary of state for external affairs, Marcel Cadieux, and the head of the department’s legal division, Allan Gotlieb. This brilliant group of lawyers tested Trudeau, honed his intellectual skills, and shaped his response to Ottawa as well as Quebec. They shared the fear that Quebec’s international ambitions could cut away the legal ties that bind a nation together, and these fears intensified when the Lesage government endured a stunning defeat in the election of June 5, 1966.
The new premier, Daniel Johnson of the Union nationale, promised to be much more nationalistic than Lesage, who in the final weeks of the campaign had ferociously denounced separatism. Johnson, whom Trudeau had met in the 1940s and who had been an early subscriber to Cité libre, campaigned on the slogan of his 1965 book, “equality or independence,” and promised in the first plank of his party’s platform to make Quebec “a true national state” through an extension of the province’s powers and its sovereignty, especially on the international level. On election night, Johnson ominously remarked that, when you subtracted the Jewish and English Liberal vote, 63 percent of the French “nation” had rejected the Liberals. “Too many people,” Johnson opined, “treat the BNA Act like a sacred cow, even though it’s been violated many times in closed committee sessions and even in hotel rooms. So why not get rid of it and draft a sixth constitution?”
Trudeau, of course, personally rejected all these premises: the need for a new Constitution, the equation of the French-speaking population of Quebec with a “nation,” the need for special status for Quebec, and the right of Quebec to have separate international representation. His group, together with Al Johnson, who had joined the Department of Finance from the Saskatchewan bureaucracy, began to elaborate a strong federal response to Premier Johnson’s demands, which were presented by Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp to the federal-provincial conference on tax and fiscal affairs in September. Firmly rejecting special status for Quebec and further “opting out” by Quebec alone, Sharp asserted the essential need for the federal government to maintain the taxing authority necessary to meet Canada’s fiscal needs. Claude Ryan in Le Devoir accurately noted the influence of Trudeau and Marchand in the federal approach, particularly in the firm rejection of “special status for Quebec.”52
For much of the fall of 1966, Trudeau himself was absent from Ottawa because he was a member of the Canadian delegation to the United Nations. There he infuriated Paul Martin Sr., Canada’s minister of external affairs, who at the time was leading all the polls as the most likely successor to Lester Pearson. In the late 1940s Pearson had established the practice of sending promising MPs of all parties to the UN as a way of building support for his foreign policy, and it proved to be an effective tool. Trudeau, however, took an immediate dislike to the elaborate rituals of the UN and to the policies Canada espoused there, particularly its tortured approach to the admission of China. He openly dissented from Paul Martin’s “two China” approach, which called for both mainland China and Taiwan to have representation and was doomed to failure.
The Vietnam War now dominated the headlines as American involvement deepened and international opposition to the war grew. Yet the UN was at the sidelines, unable to give leadership in ending the conflict. Gérard Pelletier later recalled that Trudeau often spoke about the war in these times and, like Ryan, Laurendeau, and most Quebec intellectuals, strongly opposed American involvement. Vietnam, which had charmed him so much on his 1949 voyage, disappointed him when he returned in 1959. It no longer had “charme” or “classe.” He noticed the police everywhere and the presence of the International Control Commission members, including many Canadians. Sadly he noted: “The country will perhaps be divided forever.” More disturbing was the evidence that the government in the South depended entirely on the support of the Americans, who were ubiquitous.53 However, Marcel Cadieux from External Affairs, who had served in Vietnam in the 1950s and detested Communist North Vietnam, discouraged Martin from criticizing American war policy. Trudeau, therefore, cast an increasingly wary eye towards the External Affairs Department and its minister, especially after he learned from Cadieux that Paul Martin favoured a conciliatory approach to the romance blooming between the government of Daniel Johnson and France. With Lalonde and others, he became sharply critical of Martin and warmly welcomed the January re-entry to the Cabinet of Walter Gordon, a vocal critic of American foreign policy.54
Gordon’s return would be fundamentally important to Trudeau’s future, although he barely knew Gordon at the time. Gordon was an ardent economic nationalist, an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam, a critic of Canadian membership in NATO and in NORAD, and an increasingly strong critic of Pearson, whose political career he had financed and nurtured more than anyone else.55 And the times increasingly favoured the left. Canadian Dimension, a magazine founded by one of the Vietnam “draft dodgers” from the United States who took refuge in Canada, polled many leading intellectuals in the winter of 1967 and discovered that most expected a “nationalist and socialist” government to rule Canada very soon. Pearson sensed the change and—in an astute political move—began to tack to the left.56
Gordon had expected that Maurice Lamontagne would join him in the Cabinet. When he did not, Gordon asked Pearson for an explanation. Pearson replied that Jean Marchand had vetoed the appointment—information Gordon immediately passed on to Lamontagne, who then confronted Pearson. The prime minister confirmed the story and invited the two men to his residence to sort it out. There Marchand told Lamontagne that the Quebec caucus would not accept his reappointment to Cabinet. It was a brutal blow and pointed both to Marchand’s pre-eminence in federal Quebec politics and to the opportunity open to new Cabinet members from Quebec. Not surprisingly, on April 4, 1967, Trudeau succeeded the battered Cardin as minister of justice. In a single, quite brilliant stroke, Pearson appointed the most outstanding constitutional specialist in the party just as Quebec and the Constitution were becoming the major issues facing the government, and he strengthened the left of the party just as the NDP threatened the Liberals in English Canada. On both fronts, Trudeau acted quickly to reinforce his strengths.57
The times appeared to be perfectly tailored to fit Pierre Trudeau. In 1967 the very foundations of tradition seemed to be collapsing as John Lennon declared the Beatles more popular than Jesus Christ, the pill broke down ancient sexual taboos, and the young cheered for revolution. Canada finally seemed ready to abandon its reserve as television broke through restrictions in its treatment of sex, politics, and religion. Above all, it was Canada’s Centennial Year, which began quietly but, by late spring, had become a noisy celebration of a North American country that was suddenly and unexpectedly “cool.” Expo 67 in Montreal became a wildly successful world’s fair that gave a sophisticated and modern face both to Quebec and to Canada.58
In English Canada, even Canadian Business magazine welcomed Trudeau enthusiastically and declared that the “swinging millionaire from Montreal who drove sports cars and wore ascots into the House of Commons” represented “the best traditions of the engagé intellectual.” The French press was more restrained, including Claude Ryan in Le Devoir, who complained that Trudeau did not reflect Quebec opinion in his constitutional orthodoxy. Trudeau brushed off the complaints, quickly organized his office, and embarked on an astonishingly ambitious agenda that would transform Canada. Justice Department officials who had heard of Trudeau’s “playboy” reputation were astounded to encounter a remarkably disciplined worker with great intellectual ability and an unusually retentive memory. Years later, when asked what was most impressive about Trudeau, staff members matched each other with tales about his “elephantine” memory for detail, to the point where he could recall memoranda by date and even by paragraph. Nicole Sénécal, a press secretary, said she never had a “boss” so difficult yet so wonderful.59
Initially, he focused on two major items: the Canadian Constitution and the reform of the Criminal Code. It was the latter that attracted the public’s interest as the forty-seven-year-old bachelor announced plans to legalize homosexual acts between consenting adults, permit abortion when a mother’s health was endangered, and broaden greatly the grounds for divorce. “Justice,” Trudeau told Peter Newman, then a journalist for the Toronto Star, “should be regarded more and more as a department planning for the society of tomorrow, not merely the government’s legal advisor … Society is throwing up problems all the time—divorce, abortions, family planning, pollution, etc.—and it’s no longer enough to review our statutes every 20 years.”
Within six months, in the late fall of 1967, Trudeau introduced these historic amendments to Canada’s Criminal Code, and just before Christmas the House unanimously approved the first divorce reforms in one hundred years. A senior NDP member, H.W. Herridge, praised Trudeau for creating a “precedent in Canadian history.” Where other governments had avoided divorce reform as “politically dangerous,” Trudeau himself had moved forward and had shown he was “a very sensitive, humanitarian individual.” According to one correspondent, “Trudeau blushed.”60
Lester Pearson had announced his resignation a week before Herridge spoke. The Centennial had brought much satisfaction but also considerable grief. In late July Charles de Gaulle made his official visit to Canada aboard the French warship Colbert. After landing at Quebec City, the French president made a royal progress along the historic North Shore to Montreal. There, on July 24, from the balcony of Montreal’s Hôtel de Ville, the greatest French leader of the century made his infamous declaration, “Vive le Québec libre,” before a huge and enthusiastic throng. Lester Pearson was livid; Paul Martin Sr., who was in Montreal, counselled caution. When the Cabinet met on July 25, both Jean Marchand and Robert Winters were reluctant to rebuke de Gaulle.
Trudeau disagreed: according to the Cabinet minutes, the minister of justice “said the people in France would think the Government was weak if it did not react.” Moreover, he pointed out, de Gaulle did not have the support of French intellectuals, and the French press was opposed to him. Despite the hesitations of Martin, his most senior English Canadian minister, and Marchand, the leading Quebec minister, Pearson heeded Trudeau’s advice and his own instincts. With the help of the Quebec ministers, he drafted a harsh rebuke to de Gaulle, who responded by cancelling his plans to go to Ottawa. The incident strengthened Trudeau’s role within the Cabinet.61 It also raised the debate about Quebec’s future to a new intensity.
During the summer, Trudeau and Marchand consolidated their hold on the Quebec federal Liberals. The provincial party was debating a historic resolution that René Lévesque had placed before them, calling for Quebec independence followed by negotiations for an economic union with Canada. It was, Claude Ryan correctly wrote, “a new step towards the moment of truth.” For Trudeau and many of his colleagues, it was proof that Lévesque had long been a closet separatist. When the resolution was defeated, Lévesque and others left the Liberal Party and formed the Mouvement souveraineté-association—the base from which the Parti Québécois took form. At the MSA’s first meeting, Lévesque promised the triumph of a party committed to Quebec sovereignty, a party he would lead. The battle of Canada had begun.62
Lester Pearson had fought his last fight, and he knew his successor would face new battles on more difficult terrain where his skills were poor. So did Walter Gordon, whose influence in the party remained strong because he had mentored so many MPs and retained his close links with the Toronto Star. Gordon called Trudeau in mid-November and invited him to his Château Laurier suite to meet with two of his Cabinet allies, Edgar Benson and Larry Pennell. All four men agreed that they were not excited about “any of the leadership candidates.”63 Pearson had let it be known that the next leader should come from Quebec, and he initially turned towards Marchand. But Marchand’s flaws were many: his English was not good; his voluble personality was attractive but politically risky; and his judgment was not always sound. During the de Gaulle incident, he had been offside with Cabinet opinion, and his plan to allow public servants to unionize and strike was unpopular on editorial pages and among many of his colleagues.
Trudeau, in contrast, was attracting increasing attention, which he shrewdly did not exploit. The plan he had developed in the late 1930s, when he first determined he wanted a public and political life, remained in place. He would cloak himself in mystery and be the friend of all and the intimate of none. Moreover, the extraordinary discipline he revealed in bringing the Criminal Code legislation forward while simultaneously acting as the federal leader on constitutional matters dispelled most of the criticisms about the swinging playboy who had never worked.
Many friends commented that they had never seen Trudeau as happy as in the summer of 1967. True, there were some disappointments. His mother, who had nurtured his dreams of a public career, was no longer able to appreciate his success. The last note from her in his papers is a couple of tragically broken sentences from Florida written in the spring of 1965 as Alzheimer’s disease began to infiltrate her once lively, curious, and considerable mind. Her decline created a gap in his life that none could fill.
In Ottawa he was still frequently seen with Madeleine Gobeil, who taught at Carleton University and attracted great attention with an interview she did with Jean-Paul Sartre for Playboy magazine in 1966. They dined together regularly, talked long into the night, and shared their excitement about the new world unfolding before them. She introduced Trudeau to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and, probably more meaningfully, to the first James Bond movies—which, not surprisingly, Pierre relished.
Pierre’s most intense relationship during this decade appears to have been with Carroll Guérin, who now lived mostly in Britain. But after she and Trudeau spent that memorable summer together on the beach at St. Tropez, sharing an intense affair, she became ill with a serious virus. He saw her the next summer, although she was, in her own words, no longer fully a woman. They met again in 1964, when she was very ill and any physical activity was impossible. It was, she wrote, “very generous of you to want to meet me under these circumstances. I realize only too well what a burden I am, even to myself.”64
Guérin never forgot Trudeau’s kindness. He also persuaded her mother, who regarded her artist daughter’s European residence as expensive whimsy and her illness as primarily psychological, to become more generous. Like most of Trudeau’s female friends, Guérin was emotionally voluble and poured out her feelings freely and passionately. She, too, found Trudeau “emotionally withdrawn” and sought to turn the keys that locked his core. In the summer of 1967 he disappointed her when she hoped to meet him in Corsica. Instead, he left the Buonaparte Hotel before she arrived for the rendezvous, without informing her and without leaving a forwarding address. She admitted he had not “really sounded very enthusiastic over the phone in Montreal” when they planned the meeting. But, she wrote, “maybe it was all for the best … Anything you do, Pierre, will always be very close to my heart; but it would seem that as far as living together is concerned we are not able to manage … With all my heart, dearest Pierre, I wish you all the success that you so rightly deserve.” She would retain her deep affection for Trudeau despite being “stood up.”65
At Christmas that same year, it was Trudeau’s turn to be stood up. He decided that December to escape Canada’s winter and the increasing attention of politicians and the press by flying with two friends, Tim Porteous and Jim Domville, to Tahiti’s Club Méditerranée, where he intended to read Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and think about whether to seek the leadership of the Liberal Party. There, one afternoon as he was waterskiing, he attracted the attention of an alluring nineteen-year-old college student who was lying on a raft. Stunning in her bathing suit and with eyes that immediately entranced, Margaret drew crowds around her. Pierre came over to her and began to talk about Plato and student revolution—Plato, he knew well, while she was intimate with student revolt. She told him that her name was Margaret Sinclair and she was attending the new Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where student radicalism was in full flower. She was, in her words, drinking it all in—“the music, the drugs, the life.” She “jibed only at opium, scared off by Coleridge.” Yet she “did try mescaline one day, and spent hours sitting up a tree, wishing I were a bird.”
Margaret’s parents were holidaying at the Club Med with her. Her mother, the wife of the Honourable James Sinclair, a war veteran who had been a minister in the St. Laurent government, told her daughter that the man she had met was Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s minister of justice and the “black sheep” of the Liberal Party. Entranced by Margaret, Pierre joined the family at the long Club Med table for dinner each night. Margaret remembers she was not “particularly impressed,” even though her parents were increasingly aware of his growing attraction to their daughter. Later, when he, so very “shy” and polite, asked her to go deep-sea fishing, she initially said yes but went off instead with “Yves,” a handsome young French waterski instructor who was also the grandson of the founder of Club Mediterranée. He danced like a Tahitian and loved long into the night. But Pierre persisted, “old and square” though he might be. Margaret’s vitality, her astonishing beauty, and her refreshing candour left a deep impression on him as he flew home. When he next saw her, at the Liberal leadership convention three months later, the black sheep of the Liberal Party was about to become its “white knight.” At that moment, suddenly, he recalled Tahiti.66
* By the fall of 1964, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, chaired by André Laurendeau and Carleton University president Davidson Dunton, was, in historian Jack Granatstein’s words, “far and away the largest research organization in the country,” with eight divisions, forty-eight full- or part-time researchers, and a small army of consultants and students. Besides Marchand and Laurendeau, Trudeau knew well Frank Scott and journalist Jean-Louis Gagnon, who were committee members. The commission’s eight members were evenly balanced between francophones and anglophones and included one francophone and one anglophone “ethnic,” Professors J.B. Rudnyckyj and Paul Wyczynski (who is, coincidentally, the father of the archivist directly responsible for the Trudeau archive). There was one female member, Gertrude Laing of Alberta, but no Aboriginal member—the cause of much complaint during committee hearings.
* Judy LaMarsh was excluded from the final meeting when the deal was made to create the pension plans. She wrote in her bitter memoirs: “I felt that I had been shamefully treated by my Leader. Pearson did not then, nor has he ever, even acknowledged what a dirty trick he played. I admit that circumstances may have forced his hand, but I will always maintain that he did not need to do it that way.” Later, LaMarsh became a strong opponent of “special deals” for Quebec and, eventually, of Pierre Trudeau, even though he largely shared her opinion. Judy LaMarsh, Memoirs of a Bird in a Gilded Cage (Toronto: Pocket Books, 1970), 281.
* Lucien Rivard was a drug dealer whom the United States wanted to extradite. In fighting the extradition, he managed to gain the assistance of Guy Masson, a prominent Liberal, and, more important, Guy Rouleau, the parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, as well as Raymond Denis, the executive assistant to the minister of citizenship and immigration and the executive assistant to Favreau himself. Denis, it appeared, offered a $25,000 bribe to the lawyer representing Rivard. Favreau should have submitted the case to Justice Department legal advisers rather than deciding himself that no charge should be laid.
Favreau offered his resignation, Pearson refused it, but then appointed him to a new portfolio. He remained bitter for the remaining few years of his life because so many had abandoned him. Tellingly, Pearson responded to a letter from the eminent historian A.R.M. Lower, who had complained that there was too much “rot” in Canadian politics, by saying: “I do not agree that the conduct of Mr. Favreau, Mr. Lamontagne, and Mr. Tremblay, however inept and ill advised, represents any form of corruption or lack of integrity on their part.” Lower had neither mentioned the three ministers nor referred specifically to Quebec.
* The final results were 131 Liberal (129 in previous Parliament); 97 Conservative (95); 21 NDP (17); 9 Créditistes and 5 Social Credit (24 combined). There were two independents. The Liberals took 40 percent of the popular vote; the Conservatives, 32 percent. In the pre-election polls and election polls, the Liberals were in the 45 percent range and stood at 44 percent in early November, just before the election. The Liberals actually had a higher percentage of the popular vote (42%) in the April 1963 election. The Liberals did gain 12 seats in Quebec, but lost three to the Conservatives despite the party split before the election. The NDP, despite the leadership of the popular Robert Cliche, did poorly, increasing its vote to 11.9 percent only because it ran many more candidates in Quebec.
* When Madeleine Gobeil met Grace Trudeau on election night, the proud mother declared: “Now he might amount to something.” Interview with Madeleine Gobeil, May 2006.
* The young Albertan political assistant Joyce Fairbairn first met Trudeau at the Parliamentary Restaurant, where he often had breakfast after the short walk from his room at the Château Laurier Hotel. He brought, she claimed, a reputation for being eccentric “because of his initial casual attitude toward wearing apparel. In a House of Commons filled with suits and ties and socks and laced shoes, he showed a shocking tendency toward sports jackets, cravats, and sandals—sometimes worn without socks.” After “a lengthy succession of boiled eggs,” she warmed to Trudeau, who made little of the “light political conversation” that marks “the Hill,” and she grew to respect him enormously. And to like him: “From the very beginning I sensed a shyness in him that was hooked on to an element of kindness that I came to know well over the years of work and friendship.” The shyness sometimes came through—wrongly in her view—as arrogance or lack of interest. Joyce Fairbairn in Nancy Southam, ed., Pierre (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005), 39.
* When asked why he appointed Trudeau his parliamentary secretary, Pearson said: “I had read his pieces for years, and was impressed by them, particularly by his detailed technical knowledge of economics and constitutional law. We’re into a period where that’s very important, and we’ll be dealing a lot with Quebec. Pierre is a Quebecer and seems the kind of qualified person we need.” It is unlikely that Pearson had read his pieces for years, and Trudeau did not have “technical knowledge of economics.” Yet, in a period when the Quebec government had many highly sophisticated constitutional specialists, such as Claude Morin, Paul Gérin-Lajoie, and Jacques-Yvan Morin, and “technical economists,” such as Michel Bélanger and Jacques Parizeau, Trudeau was a precious asset in Ottawa.
* In one disgraceful episode when Pearson repeated the threat, Diefenbaker responded by shaking his fists at Pearson and saying that “he had a scandal” on him. Diefenbaker, in Pearson’s words, said that “he knew all about my days as a Communist.” Pearson laughed in his face and said it was the testimony of a “deranged woman,” Elizabeth Bentley, who had been a dubious but major source for J. Edgar Hoover and other Americans pursuing Communists.
* With a minority government, the House sat long into the summer of 1966. As a summer student working on Parliament Hill that year, I regularly saw Pearson and Paul Martin, whose External Affairs office was in the East Block. Even Guy Favreau made occasional appearances, but, except for a few votes in the House, Trudeau was rarely in Ottawa. I first learned about him when some friends of mine met him at a Laurentian resort in mid-summer. They found him serious with them but very flirtatious with the women.