Just Watch Me

by John English

  Cadieux was probably unaware that the brilliant young foreign service officer Allan Gotlieb, with whom Trudeau and he had worked closely and well on the Canada-France issue, was deeply influencing Trudeau’s questioning of the status quo. After Trudeau became prime minister, Gotlieb met with him often, warning him that Canada was overextended internationally, with peacekeepers scattered widely and its true interests poorly defined. The realistic Gotlieb struck a chord with Trudeau, who had spent some unhappy time at the United Nations in 1966, when he and another young MP, Donald Macdonald, openly dissented from the policies of Paul Martin on the Chinese admission issue. For too long, Trudeau declared, Canada had been the “helpful fixer,” busily attending to quarrels in Cyprus, the Middle East, and elsewhere while ignoring the dangerous French-English crisis at home. Rather, Trudeau decided, interests (the promotion of Canadian trade and the involvement of Canadians in international activities) and values (the representation of a bilingual and bicultural liberal democratic society) must coincide. Under Pearson, they had not.35

  Once Trudeau had rejected the first “review papers” by the departments, he asked Head to produce a “counter review.” Head promptly created a “non-group” of young officers he favoured to carry out the task. Conflict between the two sides was inevitable. When External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp and National Defence Minister Léo Cadieux arrived for the meeting of the Cabinet committee on defence and foreign policy on March 26, 1969, they were startled to see not only their own departmental briefs but also a totally unanticipated “Canadian Defence Policy—A Study.” This study, produced under Head’s direction, proposed a drastic cut of 50 percent in the armed forces, greatly reduced commitments to NATO, an end to a nuclear role, and more emphasis on North America and peacekeeping. The meeting promptly adjourned, and an angry Cadieux called Trudeau and said he and Sharp would resign if the paper went forward to Cabinet. Trudeau withdrew the study, but in permitting Head to circulate it, he had clearly indicated the direction he sought.

  The argument began in Cabinet, with two of its most articulate members, Donald Macdonald and Eric Kierans, ferociously supporting complete withdrawal from NATO. On the other side were Sharp and Cadieux, who were increasingly outraged by Trudeau’s attitude. Far from stepping aside from foreign and defence policy, he had become directly involved. He startled both ministers at a December 9 meeting when he dismissed the notion of NATO as a deterrent and refused to accept that the Soviet Union, when it crushed the “Prague Spring” in August, represented a threat to Canada that required a Canadian military presence in Europe. A frustrated Sharp told Cadieux more than once that he was considering resigning.36

  Sharp did not resign, but neither did Trudeau back down. Faced with a critical NATO meeting on future defence planning in April 1969, the government issued a statement on April 3 indicating that Canadian policy was under review. Trudeau told Léo Cadieux that the task force considering Canada’s NATO contribution should provide “various options to the government on … the phased reduction of the size of the forces in Europe.” Sharp, Cadieux, and Canadian representatives abroad no longer talked about the possibility of reduction but about its certainty while NATO’s Canadian critics, such as Macdonald and Kierans, continued to urge complete withdrawal. Allies quickly reacted—the Germans with understandable annoyance, the British with little understanding, and the Americans critically, though with some appreciation of Canadian attitudes. The Americans were also dealing with economic pressures that made their own senior officials reconsider the extent of their country’s commitment to prosperous Europe—particularly as they were also facing tremendous demands on their military in Southeast Asia. These reactions appear to have had little influence on Canadian policy, but when Maurice Couve de Murville, the French foreign minister in a government that had withdrawn from military participation in NATO, told Trudeau that he should be cautious in withdrawing from Europe too quickly, he apparently had some impact. Not surprisingly, Marcel Cadieux was appalled that a French minister had greater influence on Trudeau than Canada’s senior official in foreign affairs. In the end, Canadian troops in Europe were reduced from ten thousand to five thousand, with the armed forces as a whole falling from ninety-eight thousand to eighty-two thousand. And Canada’s nuclear role came to an end, though not immediately.37

  The foreign policy review followed the defence review, but the debate became dispirited as events overtook the process. The discussions about NATO represented an attempt to establish the primacy of politicians over the public service, as Head and Trudeau admitted much later, and these debates did nothing to dispel their critical attitudes toward the Department of External Affairs. Their memoir, The Canadian Way (which they wrote in the early nineties), proves this very clearly. It bristles with anger as they recall a meeting they had in Europe with a group of senior Canadian diplomats in January 1969, at a moment when the debate about the civil war in Nigeria was raging in Canada: “Yet to the ill-concealed astonishment of Trudeau and Head [curiously, they wrote in the third person], the Canadian ambassadors in Europe expressed their opinion that this major African drama was of little more than passing importance to Canada and of inconsequential influence in the web of Canada’s external relations. East-West should be the focal point, they argued, the driving force of foreign policy, the primary contender for financial and human resources. Each of us, in contrast, was concerned about the demonstrable needs of the developing countries and the inexorable influence that they would bring to bear upon future generations of Canadians.”38

  Head, in particular, held these opinions, and he was a significant influence on the prime minister. Trudeau acted immediately to create the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), pledged to increase funding for development assistance, and appointed the energetic businessman Maurice Strong as its first president. Strong also gave form to the International Development Research Centre, whose mandate it was to apply science and technology to international development. At the same time, Trudeau expanded Canada’s assistance to francophone developing countries to match the aid given, since the inauguration of the Colombo Plan, to Common wealth nations.

  Yet Head’s account in The Canadian Way must surely have puzzled many readers who recalled that in 1968, Trudeau had been widely criticized for his attitude toward the Biafra-Nigeria crisis. When a journalist demanded that Canada supply humanitarian assistance to the war victims, Trudeau replied, “Where’s Biafra?” Trudeau’s apparent indifference to the Nigerian civil war, which historian Jack Granatstein described in the Canadian Annual Review as “unquestionably … the major foreign policy issue” of 1968, baffled and even embarrassed many of his own supporters. In a decade when African liberation and decolonization had captured the hearts of progressives in the West, Trudeau struck a discordant note and set off vigorous denunciations.

  At least the prime minister was consistent. During the election campaign, a CBC interviewer had asked him about aid to the secessionist Ibos of western Nigeria, and Trudeau had responded that he asked “the funniest questions,” adding that his government had not even considered the issue. Few noticed the comment. But by mid-August the press, with the devoutly Liberal Toronto Star in the lead, wrote scathing attacks on the government, particularly for its refusal to fly medical supplies directly to Biafra. “Up to this point,” historian Robert Bothwell writes, “Trudeau had enjoyed a favourable rating from the press: Biafra proved to be the first occasion on which his reason did not appeal to their passion.” The opposition parties quickly recognized this issue, the first to tarnish his “progressive” credentials, and they launched relentless attacks in the House. On September 27, 1968, Trudeau responded in anger: “We cannot intervene, short of committing an act of war against Nigeria and intervening in the affairs of that country.”

  Yet others were sending aid directly, and Canadian churches sent Conservative member of Parliament David MacDonald and NDP member Andrew Brewin to Biafra, where they reported in early October that aid
was meagre, aircraft were needed, the Canadian response lacked basic humanity, and they had witnessed starvation.* Churches and Oxfam organized relief flights to Biafra—“Canairelief”—that began in January 1969, but official Canadian government assistance was withheld because the Nigerian central government would not give permission for direct flights, even though Head himself travelled to Africa to seek it. But as Trudeau critic Walter Stewart wrote, “Nothing happened—except that Biafrans starved, pictures of their starvation flashed around the world, and Canada took the official stance that it was all very sad.” Finally, on January 9, 1970, the government allocated funds for relief, including $1 million for “Canairelief.” The war ended four days later.39

  Trudeau’s apparent indifference to the suffering of the Biafrans tarnished his liberal credentials, as did his lack of leadership in the struggle against South African apartheid. There is only one brief reference to South Africa in his memoirs: to a journey to a “shebeen,” a popular drinking place in Soweto in 1992. “Why was Trudeau blind to Africa?” Robert Fowler, a Canadian diplomat, African expert, and Trudeau admirer later asked. In an award-winning academic study of Canada and South Africa, Linda Freeman echoes Fowler’s question and compares Trudeau unfavourably in this regard to his Progressive Conservative successor Brian Mulroney. She concludes that Canada’s economic interests and the advice the Trudeau government received from its advisers were reflected in the country’s unwillingness to end Commonwealth preferences for South African goods until 1979, even though the foreign policy review of 1970 had declared that social justice in southern Africa was in Canada’s “interest.” These policies created an apparent gap between rhetoric—in the lofty expressions of support for international development in Trudeau’s 1968 Alberta speech—and the reality of continued trade with the apartheid regime. They also reflected the failure throughout the seventies to reach the levels of development assistance promised at the end of the 1960s.40

  Trudeau had warned in his first interview after the convention that he was a “pragmatist.” He would fight for his positions, as with NATO, but he was willing to compromise. With regard to South Africa, he displayed “irritation” with those who pushed hard for sanctions; he believed sanctions were “unrealistic” and that “his energies would be better used in other areas.” Allan Gotlieb, “the realist,” found Trudeau a willing listener when he urged him to avoid those areas where Canada’s direct interests were minimal, to avoid multilateral forums where rhetoric ruled, and to concentrate on tasks where Canadians derived the most benefit and could have some impact.41 Yet Trudeau would walk only so far on the realist path: he also listened to others, notably Head, who was a self-declared idealist, and to Marchand and Pelletier, whose views echoed the sympathy for the Third World that was often expressed in Le Devoir and Le Monde. They provided the countervailing force that Trudeau so much valued. From these differences, policy finally emerged.

  Not surprisingly, Trudeau’s approach to foreign policy baffled foreign service officers and caused them to lose confidence in their minister, Mitchell Sharp, who constantly seemed upstaged by Ivan Head. The Americans agreed with Sharp’s complaints: a mid-seventies briefing for a state visit by the prime minister describes Head as “the chief architect of Canada’s foreign policy.”42 While publicly declaring that he lacked Pearson’s interest in foreign affairs, Trudeau did not lack opinions or, more accurately, sentiments, which he expressed often. They deeply influenced policy, just as they perplexed and often irritated the Canadian officials who were trying to write the foreign policy review.

  In June 1970 the Department of External Affairs published this long-awaited review: six illustrated pamphlets that featured “ordinary” Canadians with the sideburns and miniskirts of the time, all spouting the “trendy jargon of systems analysis.” These odd, colourful little books shared two common positions that generally repudiated “Pearsonian diplomacy”: henceforth “external activities should be directly related to national policies pursued within Canada,” and Canada would no longer be a “helpful fixer” for the world. Oddly, there was no pamphlet on the United States.43

  While Trudeau disdained the past and professed to leave the formation of policy to public participation and rational debate, he imprinted his own mark deeply on Canadian foreign policy. In doing so, he carried forward his beliefs, assumptions, and experiences, which, he correctly argued, differed markedly from those of the traditional Canadian foreign policy elite. A decade after the “innocent” Trudeau visited Mao’s China, his government formally recognized the People’s Republic in October 1970. Trudeau’s views also directed Canadian participation in NATO, where membership had previously meant acceptance of the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet attack. Now, however, Canadian fighter aircraft and missiles would no longer be armed with nuclear weapons. Finally, Trudeau’s critical notions about the “English” domination of Canadian foreign policy were reflected in his insistence on bilingualism in the department, support for the concept of the Francophonie, greater recruitment of francophones in the service, and even the appointment of a Canadian representative to the Vatican.

  Although economic restraints had led the government to lay off employees and close down consulates, Trudeau insisted on going ahead with the appointment of a Canadian ambassador to the Vatican. Faced with thundering denunciation from fundamentalist Protestants, the government responded that the Holy See was an excellent “listening post” for a diplomat—even though Trudeau had once said that he learned more from reading a good newspaper than from the diplomatic dispatches on his desk. As expected, Trudeau learned little from the Vatican, but he had made his point.44

  Trudeau also made a point when he refused to attend his first Commonwealth Conference in January 1969. He had loathed the British Empire and its Canadian enthusiasts when he was young, and the thought of travelling to London, participating in an imperial gathering chaired by a British prime minister, and sharing the table with other colonials rankled him in the fall of 1968. Biafra would be an issue, and Canada would become entangled in the increasingly bitter dispute between Britain and its former colonies over Rhodesia and South Africa, where a rich white minority dominated a poor black majority. Let Sharp go, he told his staff, “it’s a waste of my time.” Horrified, Gordon Robertson and other senior officials advised him he would pay a huge price as the first Canadian prime minister to boycott a Commonwealth Conference. In the end he went—resentfully.

  Because of a death threat, Trudeau received extra police protection on his arrival in London, and the whole situation made him especially impish. Time magazine captured the setting well: “There in London last week were the Daimler sedans, each with a Special Branch man riding shotgun in the front, whisking delegates from their suites in Claridges, Grosvenor House or the Dorchester to the Regency-style Marlborough House. There at the meeting itself was Harold Wilson, impatiently tapping his outsize Tanzanian meerschaum on the mahogany conference table when a speaker droned on. There, too, were Malawi’s Hastings Banda, waving his fly whisk imperiously, and Canada’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau, impetuously sliding down a banister after one tiresome session.”45

  The Queen was not amused, particularly when she saw photographs of Trudeau in mid-slide dominating press coverage of the conference. In regal understatement she told the socialist aristocrat Tony Benn that she had found Trudeau “rather disappointing.” But the British tabloids did not agree with Her Majesty, and their photographers and journalists swarmed Trudeau. One day they lurked nearby as he lunched with a glamorous blonde, Eva Rittinghausen, who told them soon after the encounter that she was madly in love with Trudeau. He is “the No. 1 catch of the international set,” she declared, and “they had fallen in love at first sight.” She did, for sure, but for Trudeau she was only another date. The next day her charms and comments appeared on the front pages. This time Trudeau was furious, and at a press conference he declared the journalists’ behaviour “crummy.” His contempt for the press, which his pl
ayfulness had often concealed in his first months of office, was now obvious to all.46

  Pierre O’Neill, who later became Trudeau’s press secretary, correctly observed in Le Devoir that if Trudeau wanted privacy, he should not boast about his exploits with young women as he so frequently did. Charles Ritchie, now back in London, reported in his diary that the press concentrated mainly on Trudeau’s love life, not on the conference itself. He, too, held Trudeau “largely responsible” for this unfortunate outcome. “He trails his coat, he goes to conspicuous places with conspicuous women. If he really wants an affair, he could easily manage it discreetly.” Ritchie, the soul of discretion about his own numerous affairs, concluded, “This is a kind of double bluff.” Others were reaching the same conclusion in early 1969. The swinging bachelor who publicly celebrated Gandhi and Louis Riel as martyrs and who charmed a gathering of Canadian students at Westminster with his erudition, candour, and wit attracted attention in London as no Canadian prime minister ever had before.47 But at home things were going badly.

  Within a year of Trudeau’s taking office, many were baffled and quite a few were disenchanted. The honeymoon had ended for the new prime minister. When he told a group of students that an intellectual could opt for the best solution, but politicians must settle for the second or third best, the Montreal Star firmly rebuked him: “If the country had wanted that man, Mr. Stanfield was available. It was essentially the dreamer of dreams who was chosen, the intellectual for whom the second best was intolerable.” Although he had begun boldly with his move to recognize China, to shake up External Affairs, to reject nuclear weapons, to make francophones full participants in Canada’s external presentation, and even to recognize the Vatican, Trudeau disappointed some of his most fervent admirers. Bob Rae, now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford’s Balliol College and no longer a Liberal, told his godfather, Charles Ritchie, in December that he disliked Trudeau because he was “much too conservative.” Many young leftists like Rae were finding a home in the New Democratic Party after Tommy Douglas prepared to step down, and in Quebec the left regarded Trudeau’s caution as a validation of their earlier reservations.48