Only four years after he had swept the nation’s hearts and polls, Pierre Trudeau sat in a bedroom of the Château Laurier Hotel on election night, calculating the knife-edge margin of the 1972 campaign that would barely retain him in office. Turning to a sweating aide, he whispered: “I’ll tell you one thing for certain: from now on, no more philosopher-king.”
From then on, there was much innovation in Trudeau’s approach, with most but not all of his agenda being limited to a perpetuation of the good old Liberal ethic, which held that the chief function of the party is to stay in power by defining and refining bureaucratic initiatives. The legions of academic enthusiasts who had enlisted early in the Trudeau crusade and organized campus clubs on his behalf were not misguided in viewing him as the first Canadian prime minister who had gone into politics with a recognizable set of beliefs. But he faced the insoluble dilemma of every professor who dares enter the political arena: intellectuals hunt truth, politicians seek power—and the twin quests operate in contrary orbits.
Most of Trudeau’s ministers qualified as the Canadian equivalent of Whigs, a British political movement described by A.R.M. Lower, the Queen’s University historian, as “people who in general were on the side of righteousness, took a benevolent attitude toward it, but felt no urge to advance interests other than their own or those with which they identified. “ In the subsequent process of travel and observation, he realized what all perceptive Canadian prime ministers have come to know: that the country is just too damn big and much too diverse to be effectively governed; that even the man who occupies the nation’s highest political office is there not to seek historical vindication or to champion a New Jerusalem, but mostly to preside over the choice of available options—cross his fingers and hope for the best. In an interview shortly after gaining office, he told me: “We need to tell the people, ‘Okay—if you want to have portable fridges on the beaches and portable television sets and so on, that’s fine, but maybe we can’t swim in the water because it’s polluted. But if we want clean water, we’ll have to pay higher taxes, which means we don’t have our portable television sets. Now what will people choose? Perhaps they’ll choose television sets. But at least they won’t say then that the government can’t do anything about pollution. I’m suggesting we have to explain this to people. Explain that they must have choices … It’s a sense of helplessness which destroys society. It’s the feeling that everything is out of control. But government can’t really solve the problems by itself. What preserves free societies is the facing of difficulties by all its citizens.”
TRUDEAU,S REIGN REMAINED an anomaly because within Official Ottawa, lucidity and frankness had always been in short supply. His deliberate vulgarisms and unwillingness to fudge the accepted quota of issues left a legacy of aphorisms, if not swift action:
Campaigning for the Liberal leadership on March 10, 1968, in Victoria: “An exciting Party should have both blondes and brunettes.”
To a bull, at an artificial insemination centre at Milton, Ontario, on June 19, 1970: “It must be a good life.”
In an interview, when asked about his prime ministerial duties: “I’m not going to let this job louse up my private life. And I don’t wear sandals around 24 Sussex Drive. I go barefoot.”
In Winnipeg on December 13, 1968, at a time of poor markets: “Why should I sell the Canadian farmers’ wheat?”
When asked in April 1970 about Canada’s indifferent policy to a starving Biafra: “Where’s Biafra?”
That last quotation—used more frequently than any other to demonstrate Trudeau’s arrogance—illustrated how even the most offhand of his comments had a deeper meaning. Unlike 99.9 percent of Canadians, Trudeau knew precisely where Biafra was, having visited that region of Nigeria during a world tour in the 1950s. His government’s policy was to recognize Nigeria as a nation but not its breakaway province of Biafra. Since Quebec was pushing for separate international status, Trudeau was trying to underline his view that, legally, Biafra did not have a separate existence and should not be treated as a separate entity.
A faint Orwellian air hung over the nation’s capital during the Trudeau years as the leader patrolled the ranks of his followers like an unblinking shark. Despite his shimmering intellect and resoluteness of purpose, Trudeau operated from a profound fallacy by attempting to stifle any signs of disagreement. Tolerating dissent is an essential means by which a society comes to terms with change, but the prime minister and his inner circle believed they could impose logic on events, that they could govern the country through legalism and reshape events to fit those legalisms. But events are never logical; history is born out of harsh realities and even harsher emotions, which cannot be cut to fit a leader’s wishes or noble intentions. The Trudeau court lived and worked in an environment as cloistered as a high-walled Gobi Desert treasure city before Marco Polo came by. What they forgot was that in a democracy, minority’s dissent is just as important and significant as majority’s assent; that thoughts and feelings, however untidy, must be gathered from diverse sources, not among the gossip spreaders of the parliamentary cafeteria. Caught between militant demands and moderate possibilities, Trudeau occasionally retreated into petulance.
For their part, most of his colleagues were quite content to let Trudeau handle parliamentary matters. They tried to copy his air of elegant disdain in the House of Commons but could rarely carry it off. Eric Kierans, the most enlightened intellect at the Trudeau cabinet table, once complained to me about the nature of its deliberations. “It was like a papal procession. When the pope steps from the altar at St. Peter’s and walks down the aisle,” he confided, “the one thing you know is that he’s going to get to the other end. You can argue and argue but, ultimately, the procession goes on its way. In cabinet, you were always listened to with great respect, but nothing would ever happen.” Around the cabinet table, Trudeau’s ministers were reduced to a league of awed men and women, not so much afraid to challenge his views as uncertain of their own in the face of his intellectual agility and strength of purpose.
I recall the time I was discussing the PM with Gordon Fairweather (later named the first chairman of Canada’s Human Rights Commission but then a Conservative MP from New Brunswick), who commanded enormous respect and affection. When the Trudeaus had given birth to one of their December 25 babies, Fairweather was delighted. In a burst of bonhomie, he went down to his local post office on Boxing Day to send a congratulatory wire. In the post office the telegrapher, a true- blue Tory, refused to transmit the message. She tried to get Fairweather to give up on it. He wouldn’t—and found the whole episode quite amusing, a vignette of his riding’s unchangeable Tory ethic. When the House session opened in January, Fairweather went up to Trudeau at the Speaker’s cocktail party and tried to tell him what had happened, thinking Trudeau might find it amusing. Trudeau sternly stared back at him, with no interest, and said—as though he thought Fairweather was fishing for a thank you for the telegram—”Oh, I never saw it. There were so many hundreds of them we decided not to be bothered.” Fairweather later commented that he felt not so much hurt as punctured—as though he had been punched in the chest, hard.
And yet there were moments when Trudeau did show his feelings. On November 21, 1979, when he walked into the Liberal caucus, only Marc Lalonde knew what was about to happen. Former health minister Monique Bégin, sensing something was up, whispered to a colleague: “Il y a le malheur à la porte” (“Misfortune is at the door”). Trudeau pulled several sheets of paper out of his pocket and in a flat voice started to read: “I am announcing today that after spending nearly twelve years as leader of the Liberal party, I am stepping down from the leadership … ,” then broke into tears, weeping too hard to finish.
WHAT HAD REALLY HAPPENED during the Trudeau years was that the very nature of Canada—a country agonizingly settled and developed in an east-west direction—swung around on its north-south axis. Nearly everything that moved—air traffic, long-distance calls, computer hoo
kups, trade, taste, ideas and ambitions—started to flow “up and down,” rather than across the continent. And yet the feds, who for generations had been hypnotized by the Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto golden triangle, still regarded Canada as an extension of Donald Creighton’s “Empire of the St. Lawrence.”
After the troubles of the 1970 Quebec Revolution were largely over, I had a long talk with Trudeau about the War Measures Act and its imposition; what I remember most about that session was his reaction when I suggested that, if he had not gone into politics and stayed as a lecturer at the University of Montreal pursuing his reform causes, he would surely have been arrested and had his books seized in the October police roundup. “Let me answer you in theory,” he replied. “If I had been on the side of those who were challenging the authority of the duly elected representatives—then I bloody well would have deserved to be in the risk of being arrested. You can’t have anarchy without somebody getting a boot in the ass at the hands of the duly elected government. So, if I’d been on the side of the anarchists, I hope I would have been mature enough to say, ‘Well, I personally didn’t deserve it, but I can understand the state not lying down and letting the anarchists take over.’”
Terminally cool, Pierre Trudeau finally took leave of his office in 1984 after a turbulent sixteen years, with elegance and grace, happy not to linger merely as macho proof of his longevity or self-importance. More than any of his predecessors, he had made tough, unpopular decisions and challenged the voters to love him or lump him. They did both. By that winter the political terrain had become either a graveyard (the West) or a minefield (the rest of the country) for the embattled Grits, and the electorate was lying in wait to humble their leader. In his novel The Deer Park, Norman Mailer postulated a law of life: “that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.” On that basis Trudeau had overdrawn his psychic account. He decided to quit because he couldn’t think of a reason to stay. The constitution was home; bilingualism was permanently in place; the deficit was out of control; his peace initiative was stalled; the economy seemed beyond salvation. There was no fun in the nation’s business anymore, half the provincial premiers were acting like reactionary duds and the Tory Opposition had a respectable leader.
Trudeau kept his blue mood private except for one curious occasion in mid-October 1983, when he interrupted a political speech he was giving at Strathroy to deliver a soliloquy on his thoughts as he was being driven through the Ontario heartland. He spoke of his bewilderment about the country he administered but had never truly understood: “There was acre upon acre of farmland, and all we could see—though I pressed my forehead against the cold window—all we could see were little lights here and there. And I was wondering: what kind of people lived in those houses? And what kind of people lived, loved and worked in this part of Canada … ?”
The reason so many Canadians were so ambivalent about their leader was that they remained ambivalent about their country. Trudeau provided a catharsis from the outdated ennui of his nineteenth-century predecessors. He exposed our collective prejudices, regional jealousies and general stuffiness, so that when his term expired, instead of completion, there remained the feeling that somehow we had let him down, that his challenge to make us a little less grey, and play it a little less safe, had gone unanswered. His departure was a mixed blessing. This dichotomy of sorrow and jubilation was best caught in an old quote from the French essayist Jean de La Bruyère, commenting on the demise of a literary rival: “It is rumoured that Piso is dead. It is a great loss. He was a good man and deserved a longer life. He was talented, reliable, resolute and courageous, faithful and generous—provided, of course, that he really is dead.”
He left office with one consoling thought. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the constitutional lawyer turned phantom prime minister, had broadened his universe and made the world his stage, never for a moment forgetting to uphold his ultimate civil liberty: the right to be himself.
UNLIKE MOST RETIRED PRIME MINISTERS, who retreat into corporate sinecures, Trudeau experienced an active afterlife. Even if he was no longer running the country, he could still sway its perceptions. This exquisitely stubborn man never yielded. Age had permanently set his face into the carved alabaster mask of some distant crusader, but he emerged from his political grave to scuttle the twin constitutional accords—Meech Lake and Charlottetown—which would have revolutionized the country’s constitution but not in the manner approved by the man in the leather coat. Trudeau had gone underground for three years after leaving power, never saying a public word. Then he emerged, rhetorical guns blazing, vigorously undermining support for Brian Mulroney’s constitutional initiatives. A member of the French-Canadian Establishment by birth, upbringing and bank account, Trudeau became the embodiment of populist defiance. He adopted the guerrilla tactics of a Che Guevara on poutine, husbanding his resources for dramatic confrontations, using the elements of propaganda and surprise to make up for his non-existent constituency.
Determined to scuttle the referendum on the ultimate version of the Charlottetown agreement, on October 1, 1992, the former prime minister spoke passionately for fifty minutes to a gathering of cronies about the perfidies of the Mulroney initiative. The venue he chose was La Maison du Egg Roll, a Chinese joint in Montreal’s working-class St. Henri district that offered all-you-can-eat buffets for $6.95. His intervention prompted nearly half of undecided Canadians to weigh in against the deal. He was not bothered by the fact that his criticism was unacceptable to most Quebeckers. As with his implementation of the War Measures Act a generation earlier, his intervention would heighten Quebec nationalist sentiment, but in his lexicon of values, that was worth no more than an emphatic shrug. John Ciaccia, a Quebec cabinet minister, accused him of “fanning the flames of bigotry,” while Jean Paré, editor of L’Actualité, wrote, “Outside Quebec, Trudeau has found himself in the company, amongst others, of marginals and extremists to whom he gives not leadership, but a justification for their prejudices.”
Long past his prime and with no tasks left undone except to defend the history he had made, he cast himself in the role of the country’s beleaguered conscience. He was listened to partly because his beguiling appearance as the Phantom of the Canadian Opera was so convincing and partly because he was willing to rattle Brian Mulroney’s chains but mostly because he played to the prejudices of English Canada. He brought out the worst in English-speaking Canadians, exposing their anti-French and anti-Catholic biases and regional jealousies. Outside Quebec Trudeau was hailed for putting down Quebeckers and their nationalist aspirations; inside Quebec he was reviled for, as Le Devoir columnist Lise Bissonnette put it, “being unreal, pathetic, a sore loser. One is nevertheless moved by this powerful man’s raging and sad look at his vanishing dreams.”
His activity was not limited to constitutional troublemaking. Trudeau consulted almost daily with his former deputy prime minister, Senator Allan MacEachen, who regularly brought parliamentary business to a halt by rallying the seventy-three Liberal members of the Upper Chamber to vote against the government. The Senate constituted Trudeau’s government-in-exile, where such warlocks as Jack Austin, Keith Davey, Jerahmiel Grafstein, Michael Kirby, Leo Kolber, Colin Kenny, Joyce Fairbairn and Royce Frith obstructed pivotal Tory legislation, including free trade, the Goods and Services Tax and the drug patent bill. (The Trudeau-appointed constitutional whiz Senator Eugene Forsey bizarrely explained, “It’s because I’m a John A. Macdonald Conservative that I sit in the Senate as a Pierre Trudeau Liberal.”) At the same time Trudeau indirectly controlled what was happening inside the Liberal party by undermining John Turner’s leadership, especially after the Bay Street lawyer jumped aboard the Meech Lake submarine. Jean Chrétien later admitted that, when he took over the party, he checked his speeches with Trudeau before delivering them.
Particularly galling to Mulroney, then in office, were the public opinion polls from 1988 onward that showed Trudeau, long retired, was consistently running ahead of him in po
pularity (55 percent to 14 percent in April of 1991), even though he was by then into his seventies and seldom budged from his art deco mansion on Montreal’s Pine Avenue. Mulroney comforted himself with a witty bit of sarcasm. “I suppose if you’re Pierre Trudeau,” he said, “it must be kind of difficult to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and know you’ve seen perfection for the last time all day.” Mila was more direct. “I want to know,” she once asked me, “why people keep saying Trudeau is such a great intellect. Because he quotes Nietzsche? I could train Nicolas to quote Nietzsche if I wanted to. This doesn’t make someone brilliant. The two keys that can unlock any door are intelligence and good judgement. Trudeau had no judgement. In sixteen years he took a strong country and damaged it. Also, I don’t understand how this short, little, ugly, pock-marked man became a sex symbol. And here’s Brian, with his wonderful, deep voice, those beautiful blue eyes, his generous nature and wonderful sense of humour …”
To Mulroney it seemed that his predecessor had not so much elevated the office of prime minister as crippled anyone bold enough to occupy it after him. To Trudeau battling the constitutional accords was only half the fun. He continued to influence social policy as well, possibly on the grounds that phantoms have to keep busy or they vanish. At a private Ottawa dinner party on April 6, 1988, held to mark the twentieth anniversary of his assumption of power, the former prime minister laid out a political agenda for the 1990s. “For too long,” he proclaimed, “we have experimented with the dark side of excellence. For too long this country has suffered from politics that stresses economic efficiency instead of social fairness—and it’s in that direction our party must make its next policy thrust.”
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