Trudeau was criticized for being a man of the past, but in response to such accusations, he would shrug and say, “I suppose Pythagoras was yesterday’s man also, but two and two still equals four.” He was an equal opportunity political assassin, criticizing Jean Chrétien (“he knew his limitations”) with the same throwaway arrogance he applied to Joe Clark (“headwaiter of the provinces”) or Brian Mulroney (“a sniveller, a constitutional pyromaniac”).
Whatever his faults, Trudeau understood the cold grammar of power and refused to succumb to—or even recognize—the pressures and pulls of a country in turmoil. Like the Phantom he staked out his ground and dominated the stage. His charter permanently transformed the relationship of Canadians to their governments; his reckless budgets left the country in such dire debt that only a wave of political reactionaries, the style of leaders he hated most, could rescue it. His pivotal contribution to the defeat of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords was a flash triumph that could in retrospect turn out to have been a national tragedy.
He was insensitive to the consequences of his political intrusions. “I’m quite prepared to die politically—when the people think I should,” he ruminated on one of the final occasions we had together. “Politicians should be like Trappists, who go around in monasteries and the only words they can say to each other are: ‘Brother, we must die one day.’ I think this is true of politicians. The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we could all be as happy as kings.”
The last time I saw him was at a Montreal reception in the spring of 1995. Looking at Pierre a generation later, the only connection to his charismatic past was the gorgeous young woman sensuously draped over his arm. He seemed less feisty, more introverted—a philosopher-king without a kingdom.
As in the third act of The Phantom of the Opera, when the protagonist is brought to ground and his magical powers desert him, Lucky Pierre was eventually abandoned by most of his groupies and disciples. He had not changed; the country had.
Then I remembered my fantasy about Pierre Trudeau as the star in The Phantom of the Opera and realized that the fat lady hadn’t sung yet. I turned to tell him. But he was gone.
Once a Phantom, always a Phantom.
—1995
Lester Pearson: A Good Man in a Wicked Time
THE POLITICAL DEEDS and misdeeds that account for a prime minister’s legacy flow as much from luck as from his character. Lester Pearson came to office at a parlous moment in his country’s history. A good man in a wicked time, he refused to subvert his decent instincts or abandon his quest for world peace and Canadian unity. He was not a politician corrupted by power, if only because he so seldom used it, except in the most subtle and unobtrusive ways.
Pearson’s vacillation in office accurately personified the confused state of the country he was trying to govern, a Canada grown uncertain of its domestic and external purposes in a rapidly changing world. Although most of the economic, social, cultural and political forces that burst into the open during the mid-sixties were already in train before he came to office in 1963, their impact accelerated so swiftly that his world blew up under him.
If there was a unifying theme to Lester Pearson’s productive stewardship, it was his fatalistic approach to history—not as an orderly progression of events, but as an accumulation of tumbling paradoxes in the midst of which anything might happen and almost nothing was foreseeable. He regarded politics as the formidable mission of trying to control that chaos, a province of infinite contingencies that no doctrine could encompass and no grand design could subjugate. At the same time he recognized that the essential issues would always remain insoluble (that’s why they were essential) and saw himself as a creative improviser, possessed by the capacity to put disappointments aside, place them in new perspective and move on. All that a sensible man could do, he realized, was to try to work through his destiny with as little unpleasantness to himself as possible. To Mike “The Diplomat” Pearson, there was nothing wrong, and much that was right, in the Canadian tradition of muddling through. “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it,” he’d comfort assistants frustrated by his indecision.
It was no accident that the most memorable aspect of the Pearson style was a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour that flourished under stress. On November 25, 1964, when the Lucien Rivard scandal was breaking in the House of Commons and it looked as if his administration might be swept out of office on the pointed allegations of Tory prosecutor Erik Nielsen, Pearson was due to make a speech to a municipal banquet in the Prairie city of Lloydminster. This was his first public appearance since the serious charges had been raised against his government, but Pearson defused the situation with this opening: “I am grateful, Mr. Mayor, for your welcome, because in your local weekly paper—which was kindly sent to me in Ottawa by air mail before I came here so I could get into the atmosphere of the community before arrival—I noticed the headline on the front page. The headline read, and I took it down, WELCOME PRIME MINISTER and then underneath, another headline SEWER INSTALLATIONS PROGRESSING … Well, I warn you, I don’t intend to go down the drain yet.”
A politician, like a clergyman, is wise not to jest too freely about his vocation, but Pearson could make his puns work for him, both as a way of puncturing his opponents’ rages and to help maintain his own equilibrium. During a question-and-answer period at a Canadian University Liberal Federation convention on February 2, 1967, he used an Adlai Stevenson story to illustrate his point. It was about the Indian fighter who crawled into the frontier fort with three arrows in his back and was asked whether it hurt. He answered: “Only when I laugh.” Stevenson would tell the story and quip: “My job only hurts me when I don’t laugh.” Pearson added: “I sometimes feel the same way.”
His amiable and irreverent lack of pretension was noticeable even in the trivia of his office arrangements. John Diefenbaker, his predecessor, had always kept in full view, as a symbol of his power, the red NORAD emergency telephone that connected him directly to the president of the United States. “I can get Ike any time,” he would boast to visitors. Pearson not only removed the instrument from his desk, but hid it so well that one morning during the winter of 1964 when it rang, he couldn’t find it. Paul Martin, the external affairs secretary, was in the PM’s office at the time. The two men heard the NORAD phone buzzing, couldn’t locate it and began to chase each other around the room like a pair of Keystone Kops.
“My God, Mike,” said Martin, “do you realize this could mean war?”
“No,” Pearson puffed, “they can’t start a war if we don’t answer that phone.”
The instrument was finally located behind a curtain, and the caller—who wanted to know if “Charlie” was there—turned out, by incredible coincidence, to have both the wrong number and accidental access to one of the world’s most private hotlines. (Pearson used the phone only once. On April 21, 1967, while he was being driven to his summer residence at Harrington Lake, his car struck a rock and broke its transmission. The hotline was the only telephone available, so Pearson called Washington to arrange for a tow truck to be sent out from Aylmer to get him moving again.)
PEARSON WAS FUSSY about personal matters, sometimes displaying a cranky peevishness toward the small errors or omissions committed by his staff. On one occasion during the Centennial summer of 1967, he got into a snit over a glorified portrait of himself done by the Vancouver artist Joyce Devlin. After he had criticized her work, he finally told her that his likeness didn’t appear to make him look strong and decisive enough. “Who do you think you are?” the artist demanded in exasperation, “Winston Churchill?” Pearson never took delivery of her canvas.
Such displays of temper were rare, and if Pearson brought little grandeur to his office, neither did he occupy it with any sense of pompous pretension. In fact, becoming prime minister changed him very little. His personal tastes remained simple and surprisingly unsophisticated, considering the number of years he had spent in the supercivilized
environment of the diplomatic circuit. The Pearsons rarely attended (or gave) cocktail parties, and when they did go, they usually lingered briefly, sipping weak rye and ginger ales. The rivalry between Pearson and John Diefenbaker even intruded into sport. They both enjoyed fishing, but neither had much luck at Harrington Lake, the PMs’ official summer residence. Pearson kept hearing rumours that Diefenbaker had caught a four-and-a-half-pound trout and was unable to match this record. When he tracked the story down by talking to a farmer who lived nearby, he was delighted to discover that, while Diefenbaker had indeed hooked such a fish, he’d never got it into his boat.
Pearson’s passion for baseball, hockey and football was intense. On one occasion, when he met two Ottawa Rough Riders in their civilian clothes, walking along a Château Laurier corridor, he not only recognized them, but also knew what positions they played and what their records were. After a crucial game in the 1965 Stanley Cup playoffs, he was taken to visit the
Maple Leafs’ dressing room. Even though the exhausted players were sitting around in sweaty underwear with their numbers off, he knew each man’s name and could discuss his statistics. Earlier, during a dismal political journey into rural Saskatchewan in 1958, Pearson was slumped in the back of a car, listening to the rasping tones of an old political colleague, Jimmy Gardiner, as he held forth on the iniquities of Tory agricultural policies. Pearson said nothing for mile after dusty mile, but as they drove through a small elevator town, he suddenly came to life and interrupted Gardiner by abruptly exclaiming, “Hey, that was Floral we just passed through. That’s where Gordie Howe was born.”
He followed the World Series with fascination, no matter what crisis might be claiming his attention, and could name the starting line-ups and batting averages of most American teams. On May 10, 1963, during his first official call on President John F. Kennedy at Hyannis Port, his knowledge was put to the test by Dave Powers, the resident White House baseball expert. While Kennedy listened, the two men traded managers’ names, World Series statistics and other diamond lore. It was Powers, not Pearson, who tripped up on some southpaw’s 1926 earned- run average. “He’ll do,” Kennedy remarked, and the two leaders proceeded to equip Canada with nuclear warheads.
Invariably charming in private conversation or intimate gatherings, Pearson often came across as disdainful and remote on the hustings, where the effectiveness of a democratic politician must be tested. Whenever he led the Liberals into electoral battle, he marched them backwards, snatching near defeat from the jaws of victory. Denied a parliamentary majority, Pearson was deprived of any political leader’s most valuable asset: a clear mandate from his people. The reason he stirred so little mass emotion at election time was due to a basic shyness. There was about him an air of reserve, a feeling that he should not be drawn into situations where his prestige would be risked in routine encounters. He confessed to close friends that he just couldn’t walk up to strangers and pump their hands without being afraid of either invading their privacy or compromising his dignity. He acted always within the consciousness of his limitations and of the voters’ awareness of them. The simple fact was that he didn’t like people in large groups because he thought they didn’t like him.
At the start of the 1963 election, party organizers had worked hard to mount a successful campaign kickoff in London, Ontario, traditionally a poor territory for the Liberals. They succeeded so well that they not only filled the city’s largest arena, but were also left with an overflow of two thousand potential supporters outside the hall. When Pearson drove up, David Greenspan, a bright young Toronto lawyer who had headed the local organization drive, pushed his way toward the limousine, shoved his head through the car window and shouted: “Mr. Pearson! These people outside can’t get in. They’ve been waiting for two hours in the cold. Here’s a bullhorn; you have to say something to them.” Pearson shrank back and, with an emphatic head shake, said: “I can’t do that.” Finally, Gordon Edick, then the Ontario Liberal party’s assistant director, physically barred Pearson’s way into the arena until he had grasped the bullhorn to mutter an awkward acknowledgement of the crowd’s enthusiasm.
This absence of communicable political passion confirmed him in the public mind as a curiously disengaged politician who could not be brought to bay by the urgencies of the moment. Although he had the advantage of great national issues to make the country hang upon his words, on few occasions did passion— or anger—burst through to reveal the extent of his emotional commitment to his own policies. In an age of image politics, when inspiration was replacing identity as the link between voter and candidate, Lester Pearson seldom projected any sense of personal commitment.
This feeling was reinforced by the fact that, during the first three years of his time in office while his government reeled from mishap to misfortune, few, if any, of the Liberals’ legislative measures resembled the original proposals on which they were based. The Canada Pension Plan went through at least four mutations; the 1963 compromise with the provinces over the municipal loan fund made it into something very different from what had initially been put forward. Pearson’s method of government often seemed to consist of engaging the nation in a horrendous rescue operation, made necessary by the Liberal leader’s precipitate tackling of some hitherto insoluble national problem. Each time, Pearson’s own political backtracking raised national frustration to such a peak that public opinion finally solidified behind him in order to help the government find some way out of its self-generated crisis. Almost as a side effect, the issue itself would have been reduced to reconcilable proportions. While this method achieved some impressive results, Pearson’s personal credibility diminished in the process.
The most spectacular example of the method’s success was Pearson’s crusade for the adoption of a distinctive Canadian flag. When he abruptly produced a red, white and blue pennant with three maple leaves in May of 1964, only a few Canadians felt particularly involved in the flag issue. Seven months later, so much public pressure had been built up that a majority of Canadians were hotly in favour of resolving the flag debate one way or another, and when the Liberal government applied parliamentary closure to cut off the Conservative anti-flag filibuster, there was hardly a ripple of resentment. The fact that the flag adopted had one less colour and two fewer maple leaves than the initial design didn’t really matter— least of all to Pearson, who regarded adoption of a distinctive Canadian flag (no matter what its detailed design) as his greatest accomplishment.
WHILE HE ALWAYS APPEARED to be conciliatory, most of Pearson’s achievements came about through a procession of crises that precipitated their own solutions, like thunderclouds that send down rain to clear the sultry air. He was at his best in times of great stress when his diplomatic training allowed him to underreact to the torrent of events threatening to engulf him. “That’s blood under the bridge,” he would airily say to nervous aides as they fretted about the next catastrophe that could befall the government. Grant Dexter, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press and a reporter of wisdom and tender conscience, once wrote about his close friend: “Mike is happiest when he’s clinging to a precipice and just about to fall off.”
During the crunch of a crisis, Pearson would launch himself on two or three different courses of action at the same time, agreeing with advisers who offered conflicting opinions, reserving his own decision until everyone else had shown their hand. His government’s legislative proposals were treated like position papers presented at the beginning of international conferences, statements of basic intent open to revision as negotiations proceeded. He would allow events to play over possibilities, forcing the outlook now one way, now another. Then, just as the conflicting sets of options seemed about to collide, he would move in with a compromise that left all those involved free to claim partial victory. As the quintessential diplomat-politician, he was always more concerned with the consequences of failure than the rewards of success.
Because Mike Pearson felt certain that his inelegant fumbli
ngs at the negotiating table would be proved irrelevant by the long sweep of history, he was never overly concerned with press and public criticism of his style. But to a nation in trouble, the appearance of poised, responsible political leadership was not a factor of marginal consequence. To look wise was nearly as essential as being wise. Television had made the average citizen more aware of process; the mastering of technique had become the mark of modern man.
Even if it achieved most of his objectives, the Pearson method was undignified, creating the impression of a bumbling administration making the worst of each bad situation. Pearson’s manner left the unfair impression of a prime minister who could not grip events on the move and was continually sprinting toward greatness only to stumble over self-erected barriers.
Yet it was the great paradox of the Pearson stewardship that, even if his government was not as good as it should have been, it was much better than it appeared to be. Although Pearson’s achievement seemed limited to the civilizing of the status quo, an impressive stream of useful reforms were somehow squeezed through the minority parliaments.
As well as the new flag, Pearson’s remarkably long legislative record included important reforms in parliamentary rules and the committee system; a reorganization of government departments; the foundations of a bilingual federal civil service; the redistribution of constituency boundaries by an independent commission; important changes in federal-provincial relations; the beginnings of constitutional reform; a new bank act; new regulatory agencies for transportation and broadcasting; a new labour code; the Canada Pension Plan; the Canada Assistance Plan; a guaranteed minimum income plan for old age pensioners; medicare legislation; the setting up of a health resources fund; youth allowances; the liberalization of divorce laws; industrial research incentives; provision for technical and vocational training schemes; a doubling in the External Aid program; the abolition of capital punishment for a trial period of five years; new bankruptcy, company and consumer legislation; the unification of the armed forces; collective bargaining for the civil service; establishment of the Order of Canada; new feed grain and crop insurance legislation; a fund for rural economic development; a new immigration act; and the setting up of several important new agencies, including the Economic Council of Canada, the Science Council, a corporation to encourage the Canadian film industry, the Company of Young Canadians and a corporation to manage and phase out the Cape Breton coal industry.
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