Pierre Elliott Trudeau

by Nino Ricci

  In later years Trudeau would give the impression that Harvard had merely confirmed him on a path he had already been on. The evidence, however, suggests that it was exactly at Harvard that the ideas that later defined him first took root. His writings of the time show that what he took from Harvard was not simple theory but a growing understanding of the complex ways in which societies function and of how their various aspects—their laws, their economies, their political systems—interconnect. From someone who had had a suspicion of liberalism and democracy and capitalism bred into him from a young age, he was becoming a grudging convert. He was also starting to understand how pie-in-the-sky some of his youthful ideas had been. Back in Montreal, writing his manifestos for les X, he hadn’t given much thought to how his Laurentian state would put food on the table.

  In 1946 he earned his master’s from Harvard and went on to Paris to do courses at the École libre des sciences politiques and the Sorbonne. His plan was to begin research for a doctorate on the relationship between Christianity and Communism, a topic that showed how far he had come in his thinking in his two years at Harvard. In Paris he ended up spending little time in class, however, and much more touring the cafés with old acquaintances from Quebec he had met up with there. These included Gérard Pelletier, whose close, lifelong friendship with Trudeau really dated to this time; Roger Rolland, who had been part of Trudeau’s Prussian soldier prank; Jean-Louis Roux, who presumably was still awaiting his reprisals from les X; and his former Brébeuf mentor, François Hertel. In 1947 Hertel would be expelled from the Jesuits for his controversial views, and eventually his trenchant nationalism would result in a bitter split between him and Trudeau. But for now his presence brought Trudeau away from his Harvard liberalism and back to the question of religion.

  It was during his time in Paris that Trudeau came to embrace personalism, a philosophy that was to provide him another bridge between the values he had grown up with and the ones he was evolving toward. Founded by the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier, personalism was a sort of spiritualized existentialism, asserting the primacy of the individual and of free will but balancing these with the demands of social conscience and social responsibility. For Trudeau, the philosophy became—perhaps a bit conveniently—a means both of holding on to his past and of remaking it, transforming a Catholicism that in Quebec had consisted of a close-minded authoritarianism into one consonant with the principles of liberal democracy and individualism. Implicit in the philosophy was an almost Protestant notion of personal conscience that would later serve as a bulwark for Trudeau in his battles with the priestbased Catholicism of Quebec.

  Another great influence on Trudeau at the time was the French philosopher and political thinker Jacques Maritain, a Catholic convert who advocated a philosophy he called integral humanism. Like personalism, it sought a way to reintroduce the spiritual element that had been lost in secular humanism. As one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947, Maritain was a key figure in establishing the notion of inalienable rights that would one day motivate Trudeau’s own Charter. The Nemnis point out, however, that when Trudeau had read Maritain in 1944 while still in Quebec, he had not been especially impressed, accusing him of hanging on “to a backward-looking democracy” and of being “right out of it” where practical issues were concerned.

  From Paris, without having accomplished much in terms of his studies, Trudeau moved on after a year to the London School of Economics, abandoning his dissertation on Communism and Christianity to start a new doctoral program in political science. Friendless again, Trudeau found London a repeat of his experience at Harvard. For a “citizen of the world,” he was not yet very adept at negotiating unfamiliar environments, and he found postwar London a tremendous letdown after Paris. At the LSE, however, he studied under the world-renowned leftist Harold Laski, who ended up having a tremendous influence on him. Trudeau had been drawn to the left during his time in Paris, where Communism had been very much in vogue and even the personalists leaned toward a kind of Christian socialism. Now Laski, a mythic presence at the LSE, drew him further. Laski had a towering intellect but was also a brilliant and beloved teacher—and someone who, like Trudeau, relished a good fight.

  Laski was also a Jew. In his memoirs, Trudeau made frequent references to the wide range of humanity he encountered in his studies abroad, a situation that was “a complete change from the rather parochial climate” he had known growing up in Montreal. In all likelihood, the notion of multiculturalism Trudeau later came to espouse in Canada actually had its roots in these first real experiences outside the country. The Montreal of his childhood was hardly monocultural, yet he had lived it as such, where everyone who was other—the English, the immigrants, the Jews—was the enemy. Now the boundaries between “us” and “them” were dissolving; it was in this sense that he truly became a “citizen of the world.” Now his friends were Jews; now his professor and mentor was. Canada didn’t make him a pluralist; the world did, in these very personal bonds he developed—first in his studies and later in his travels—with people who had previously been entirely outside the realm of his experience.

  According to John English, Laski, as one of the major thinkers in the British socialist movement, became a model for Trudeau of the “engaged intellectual.” In Laski, Trudeau saw what he himself could be. Trudeau later said that it was in London that “everything I had learned until then of law, economics, political science, and political philosophy came together for me.” Indeed, the titles of his courses with Laski read like a checklist for every tool Trudeau would later need in his political toolkit: “Democracy and the British Constitution,” “Liberalism,” and “Revolution.” Even Trudeau’s understanding of federalism went back to Laski: the sharing of power in federal systems was one of Laski’s major areas of interest.

  Trudeau completed a year of studies at the LSE but, as at the Sorbonne, he obtained no degree, having by now abandoned the idea of a doctorate. Before returning home, however, he set himself one more “challenge,” as he put it: he had decided to travel the world. Rather than sticking to the wellworn routes, however, he intended “to range more widely.” To that end he would eschew the more comfortable means of travel he could well have afforded in favour of those “of Everyman,” going on foot, by bus, by cargo boat, the better “to mix with local populations” and “learn their habits, their troubles, and their reactions.”

  Despite the slightly anthropological tone of his description of it, the trip proved to be as crucial, in its way, to Trudeau’s later political career as his international studies would be. For one thing, much of the mystique that surrounded him, and in particular the sense of his having been a hippie avant la lettre that so appealed to young people, derived from this trip. But just as importantly, the trip humbled him. The stories that were told afterwards were the dramatic ones, the arrests and near-arrests, the wars and the revolutions. But in later years what always struck people who travelled with Trudeau was his tremendous humility as a traveller, his ability to immerse himself in a foreign culture without presuming to know better than his hosts. It was a humility, according to Trudeau’s son Alexandre, that went back to this first trip.

  Alexandre’s foreword to a 2007 reissue of Two Innocents in Red China—an account by his father and Jacques Hébert of a trip they took together in 1960—talked about the importance of his father’s earlier round-the-world trip, when for first time Trudeau stepped beyond the borders of the “well-established social values” he had been able to depend on until then.

  In the Canadian wilds, he had deliberately deprived himself of physical and even psychological shelter, but he had never had to deal with the near total absence of all moral shelter. In his great journey of 1949 he found himself on many occasions without the protection of the rule of law, in situations where he had to rely for survival not on his own wits or strength of limb, but on a force completely beyond his control: the kindness of strangers.

  It was a very d
ifferent Trudeau who would return to Quebec at the end of 1949 than the one who had left it in 1944. It was still not quite the Trudeau we would come to know of, or the Trudeau we would think we knew, but by now all the scaffolding was in place.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cité libre

  Trudeau, at thirty, returned from overseas to be immersed almost at once in an event that truly marked his emergence as a public figure, the Asbestos Strike in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. The strike was a turning point in the Quebec union movement, pitting the French-Canadian working class not only against the English bosses who ran the mines and the foreign bosses who owned them, but against the Quebec leader who allowed these bosses free rein, Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis, the founder of the ultra-conservative Union Nationale, would rule Quebec with near-dictatorial force until his death in 1959, in a reign that would come to be known as la Grande noirceur, the “Great Darkness.”

  It was through the strike that the future Three Wise Men first came together. Trudeau had hardly unpacked before Gérard Pelletier, who was covering the strike for Le Devoir, drove him out to Asbestos to see the strike first-hand and to meet his friend Jean Marchand, who by then was already a fabled union organizer and was the de facto strike leader. The Asbestos Strike threw Trudeau at once into a political role that, like his personalism, provided a bridge between his old self and his new one, integrating his new interest in social democracy and individual freedom with his old commitment to freeing Quebec from the yoke of les anglais. But Duplessis himself was also a bridge: despite the close alliance between Duplessis and the Catholic Church that helped him keep a stranglehold on power, the Jesuits at Brébeuf had seen him as interloper, someone who had turned their own brand of socially oriented nationalism into one divorced from any real social commitment. In his play Dupés, John English notes, Trudeau had pilloried Duplessis in the character of Maurice Lesoufflé. Now it was through Duplessis—who always draped himself in the banner of nationalism but who called in the thugs and police who eventually broke up the strike—that Trudeau came to understand how Quebec nationalism often amounted to little more than a way for the elites to control the masses.

  Though the strike was technically illegal, it garnered wide public support. In Montreal, Archbishop Joseph Charbonneau broke ranks with the church hierarchy and spoke out forcefully on the workers’ behalf. In the end, however, the government forces came down hard, beating up resisters and making mass arrests, and the unions, after four months of bitter struggle, were forced to settle for a meagre pay increase. Many of the strikers never regained their jobs, and Charbonneau was forced to resign and was exiled to Victoria. Yet Trudeau would not be alone in seeing the strike as a turning point in Quebec. For once the public had taken a stand against the government on an issue of social justice, and a rift had opened up, however briefly, in the monolith of church and state.

  Trudeau’s main contribution to the strike was to offer free legal representation for workers who had been falsely imprisoned or had been intimidated or attacked by police. But it was his brief experience on the front lines, when he made the fiery speech that left Marchand disgruntled and joined the workers on the pickets, that most stayed with him. Coming as it did directly after his travels, it showed Trudeau how the world of oppression and poverty that he had experienced abroad was also right in his backyard. He had found a Quebec he had been unaware of, one “of workers exploited by management, denounced by government, clubbed by police, and yet burning with fervent militancy.” His later writings about the strike were to be considered his finest.

  On a practical level, however, his involvement in the strike had the effect of rendering him virtually unemployable in any government position in his home province. An application he made for a teaching position at the Université de Montréal was promptly turned down, despite his impeccable qualifications, and twice more over the decade that Duplessis was to continue in power Trudeau would apply for university positions and be refused. Marchand offered Trudeau work in the union movement, which would have been a logical fit, particularly as Trudeau had no need for a princely income. Instead, to the surprise of everyone, Trudeau left Montreal shortly after his work with the strike ended to take a job as a clerk in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa.

  Trudeau’s stated reason for leaving was his failure to get a teaching post. Yet the strike had shown that there was clearly a need in Quebec for someone with his talents. There may have been a part of him that balked at working in the trenches, where the chances to shine were so few, and where he could count not on the approval of his superiors, as in the past, but only on their condemnation. But a clerkship was hardly the place to make his name. It seemed, rather, that his first instinct on returning home was to flee again. Back in his old environment he must have felt a strange disjunction between his old self and his new one, between the old Quebec, which had seemed familiar and safe and unchanging, and one that looked very different in its sameness. The same elites, as he said, the sense of being mired in old ways of thinking, but also different despite itself, changed, like the rest of the world, by the war. Part of this change in Quebec was the collective amnesia that would have set in by then among all his old nationalist friends, one that would leave the fascistic excesses of their earlier nationalism unexamined for many years to come.

  Trudeau, however, was not the sort to frame his decisions as flights from something, as much as they might be, but rather as adventures into. As challenges, in other words, and the challenge of Ottawa was a legitimate one. He was no longer one to take on an enemy at someone else’s say-so; he would see for himself, as he had learned to do on his travels. In Israel, in the midst of a war, he had got himself smuggled into Jerusalem with a group of Arab soldiers after being turned away, though the adventure had landed him in an Arab prison for two days as an Israeli spy. In 1952, at the height of McCarthyism, he would travel to the Soviet Union for an economic conference, a trip that would briefly put him on the American blacklist. This insistence on forming his own opinions, on dealing with the other directly, would mark his years in power and would be what lay behind his very open relations with countries like Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union.

  What he found in Ottawa was that it was not the citadel of evil it was often seen as in Quebec, but something rather more human and also more narrow and mundane, particularly after London and Paris. Francophones, it was true, were scarce and condescended to; English was the only language of communication. If Trudeau excelled at everything he did, it was no doubt partly to show his English superiors that he was their equal. Yet in this supposed nest of vipers he also found many good people to admire and respect. His boss was Gordon Robertson, a career civil servant who would achieve near-legendary status, serving under five prime ministers. Robertson knew the value of having a French Canadian on staff capable of dealing with constitutional issues and federal–provincial relations, and he gave Trudeau responsibilities that went far beyond the usual ones for a junior clerk. At a 1950 constitutional conference in Ottawa, Trudeau also had a chance to cross paths again with F.R. Scott, who attended the conference as an adviser to Saskatchewan’s CCF government.

  Trudeau played his assigned role in Ottawa, adopting the required neutrality of a civil servant and making dispassionate cases for all sides of an issue. On questions of federalism, however, he let his opinions come through, consistently arguing against any encroachment on provincial powers. Here in Ottawa he had a chance to witness in the real world how the parts of a state worked together to form a functioning whole, and that part of him that his friends referred to as “his legalistic side” seemed to take great pleasure in trying to apply to Canada what he had learned in his studies abroad.

  As anomalous as his departing for Ottawa had seemed, the two years he ended up spending there were likely pivotal in his agreeing a decade and a half later to run for federal office. They showed Trudeau not only that his studies could be applied directly to Canadian issues, but that Ottawa was a place neither to
fear nor to loathe. He cut a swath there both professionally and socially: he was often seen about town with some beautiful young woman on his arm and found challenges that were sufficient to keep him engaged but were never beyond him. In the end, however, his argumentative nature began to chafe against the strictures imposed on civil servants. He did not always see eye to eye with the St. Laurent government, and he had particular problems with the external affairs minister of the time, who was none other than Lester Pearson. Trudeau, John English notes, was incensed at Pearson’s support for the Americanled intervention in the Korean War, seeing it as a mere aping of American Cold War policy. “Not a single original thought,” Trudeau wrote to a colleague in External Affairs after hearing Pearson’s speech on Korea in the House. “A little current history, a lot of propaganda.”

  Trudeau was rescued, finally, by Cité libre, which gave him both a reason to leave Ottawa and an excuse to, since he couldn’t continue as a civil servant while publishing a polemical journal. There are varying stories about the origins of Cité libre—Trudeau himself claimed the idea went back to discussions in Paris after he and his Quebec friends heard that Duplessis had banned the film Les enfants du paradis. In any event, it was Gérard Pelletier who got the ball rolling while Trudeau was still in Ottawa. He pulled Trudeau into the project over the objections of many of his other recruits, who felt uneasy around Trudeau because of his background and his manner and his wealth. Trudeau’s financial support, however, would end up keeping the journal afloat. Even at its height it would never have more than a few thousand readers, yet in the midst of the Grande noirceur of the Duplessis era it was one of the few rays of light. It was also where Trudeau himself was able to hone his ideas and to develop a firmness of conviction and clarity of thought that would later serve him well.