Just Watch Me

by John English

  Trudeau’s rhetoric raised expectations, his style encouraged hopes, and his background offered reasons for new departures in Canada’s relationships with the world. Yet, as Tom Axworthy later pointed out, Trudeau’s idealism, which was reflected in his support for international development, was balanced by realism about Canada’s role as a large small power in a divided world. Trudeau found truth in Allan Gotlieb’s argument that Pearson and his generation had not explained to Canadians that “the foundation of our foreign policy must be our own national self-interest and that, like other states that have always recognized this fact, we should have no illusions about the very purposes which a country’s foreign policy is meant to serve.” Although he had ambitions to build a better world, he accepted Gotlieb’s argument that Canada’s own national self-interest must be paramount—and in the late 1960s there was no greater concern than the threat to Canadian unity from Quebec separatism.49 In 1970 that threat became a crisis—with huge ramifications for Canada.

  * Trudeau had interviewed to be one of the hosts, but LaPierre got the position. Carroll Guérin, who was aware how much Trudeau wanted the position, commiserated with him: “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 prior to ideas—but what can you expect from Toronto?” On Trudeau and the CBC, see Eric Koch, Inside Seven Days: The Show That Shook the Nation (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1986), 45; and Carroll Guérin to Trudeau, Dec.16, 1964, TP MG26 02, vol. 49, file 8, LAC. The significance of the program is recognized by the Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communication. Its appraisal of the program, written by William O. Gilsdorf, is lukewarm. While praising its technical innovations and creativity, Gilsdorf notes that “the Seven Days team often seemed to achieve the goal of involving the viewer in the emotion and actuality of television while innovating on and stretching the conventions of TV journalism. It is also clear that the team was often seduced by the power of television to embarrass guests or sensationalize issues through manipulative set-ups like the KKK interview. The series often entertained, perhaps more than it informed, foreshadowing the current concern and debate over the line between news and entertainment,” http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/T/htmlT/thishourhas/thishourhas.htm.

  * When she sought an interview for her New Yorker profile, Iglauer had met Roméo LeBlanc, Trudeau’s press secretary, and was told Trudeau was too busy to see her. She then learned about the trip from LeBlanc and told him she had written a book on the North. She sent the book to Trudeau, who asked Gordon Robertson, a former deputy minister of northern affairs, if she should go. Robertson apparently replied, “Take her with you. You won’t be sorry.” He wasn’t. Iglauer was an engaging companion and wrote a fine sketch. On one occasion, at Cassiar Asbestos Mine, Trudeau rode a motorbike expertly in circles. Iglauer asked Charles, “What was it like to be his younger brother?” He laughed and replied, “Pierre always had to have the last word.” She used these words as the opening for her article. Iglauer in Nancy Southam, ed., Pierre: Colleagues and Friends Talk about the Trudeau They Knew (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005), 81–82; and Iglauer, “Prime Minister / Premier Ministre,” New Yorker, July 5, 1969, 36–60.

  * The co-winner was Katharine Hepburn for her performance in The Lion in Winter. Barbra tripped on her pantsuit as she walked on stage and discovered later that the bright television lights seemed to make her striking outfit transparent.

  * Margaret’s father, Jimmy Sinclair, seems to have welcomed the romance. He wrote to his former Cabinet colleague and Margaret’s godfather, Doug Abbott, in February 1969 that of his children, Margaret was “the best scholar of the lot but has been very leftish.” She had become interested in Trudeau and wanted to attend the Liberal convention for that reason. He noted that the family had gone to Tahiti at Christmas and “that’s where … [Margaret and her sisters] met Trudeau and developed such a crush on him!” Sinclair to Abbott, Feb. 28, 1969, Abbott Papers MG 32 B6, vol. 4, LAC.

  * When the book was republished in 1968, Trudeau added a preface indicating he was wary that his earlier words might have been provocative. He added an “all-purpose disclaimer”: “If there are any statements in the book which can be used to prove that the authors are agents of the international Communist conspiracy, or, alternatively, fascist exploiters of the working classes, I am sure that my co-author, Jacques Hébert, who remains a private citizen, will be willing to accept entire responsibility for them.” Two Innocents in Red China, trans. I.M. Owen (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1961; repr., Vancouver: Douglas and McIntye, 2007), ix.

  * This trip infuriated Trudeau, who also believed that the support for separatist Biafra was profoundly dangerous. In his papers there is a rough note written in 1971: “This govt never supported Portugal in Africa…. But NDP & Conservatives were on the side [underlining in original] of Portugal in Africa, in its attempt to break up territorial integrity of Nigeria.” TP MG 26 020, vol. 22, file 14, LAC.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE OCTOBER CRISIS

  During the 1960s Trudeau became convinced that Quebec would enjoy a better future inside Canada than separate from it, and his chief motivation for coming to Ottawa had been to achieve that goal. In terms of foreign relations, he always insisted that he be personally involved in those areas where the federal government’s policies toward Quebec coincided with Canada’s international policy. Even before he became prime minister, he had worked with Michael Pitfield, Marc Lalonde, and Marcel Cadieux to stiffen Ottawa’s resistance to French support for a distinct Quebec international presence and to Quebec’s assault on the federal monopoly over external relations.

  Early in 1968, for instance, Trudeau took a direct role in cutting off relations with Gabon, which had invited Quebec to an educational conference in defiance of Canadian objections. This aggressive response angered the Union nationale government and found little support in Quebec’s francophone universities. Between 1967 and 1970, Trudeau deplored the willingness of Premier Daniel Johnson and his successor, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, to deepen ties with de Gaulle’s France beyond what was acceptable for a component of a sovereign state. Knowing that France’s former African colonies could be pawns in the game France and Quebec might play, Trudeau quickly expanded Canadian representation in, and aid to, those countries and to the Francophonie as a whole. De Gaulle’s encouragement of Biafra’s independence only strengthened Trudeau’s opposition to it. As the prime minister told journalist Peter C. Newman: “To ask, ‘Where’s Biafra?’ is tantamount to asking, ‘Where is Laurentia?’ the name Quebec nationalists give to the independent state of their dreams.”1

  Those dreams increasingly became Trudeau’s nightmare after René Lévesque broke with the Quebec Liberal Party in October 1967 and created the Mouvement souveraineté-association. In April 1968, the same week that Trudeau won the Liberal leadership, the “mouvement” retitled itself the Parti Québécois. Trudeau knew that Lévesque was a formidable opponent, but the PQ was only one of five parties in the province (the NDP and the Créditistes also had support) and initially seemed far from power. There was even some satisfaction among the federal Liberals, including Trudeau, that the ambiguity that had previously cloaked separatism had disappeared. However, economic dislocation, a nasty quarrel over immigrant language rights in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Léonard, a weakening Union nationale government, and a divided Quebec Liberal Party served to intensify nationalist feelings and civil dissent. Jean-Jacques Bertrand’s government’s attempt to solve the language problem with Bill 63 in 1969 literally drove protesters into the streets. In February a bomb exploded in the Montreal Stock Exchange just before closing time, injuring twenty-seven people. A shocked city and increasingly alarmed country registered the turbulence but reacted in different ways: Claude Ryan deplored the attack on ordinary citizens and warned, in Le Devoir, that these tactics would lead to disaster; the Globe and Mail reported that murders had increased by 50 percent in Montreal
over the previous year and that some two thousand armed holdups had occurred. Ryan’s suggestion that this growing “climate of violence” found its source in the grave injustices in Quebec’s past found no echo in the Globe editorial.2

  As tensions rose, friends and families divided. Premier Johnson’s two sons, Daniel and Pierre-Marc, for example, began to walk different paths at the end of the sixties: “Up to then, their paths had been almost identical. The same education, same apprenticeship for a public life, same group of friends, same holidays, even the same legal studies.” Then Daniel entered the world of finance and supported federalism, while Pierre-Marc chose medicine, social activism, and separatism. Both went on to become premiers representing their respective causes. Trudeau’s oldest friends similarly took sides, and many parted from him. With others there was a new uneasiness. The economist Jacques Parizeau, whose brilliant wife, Alice, was a particular favourite of Trudeau and had often invited the middle-aged bachelor to dinners in the sixties, announced in the fall of 1969 that he now supported Quebec independence. Labour leader Michel Chartrand, who with Trudeau had fought against conscription in 1942, demonstrated in support of the Asbestos strikers in the late forties, and worked in union politics in the fifties, now called for a socialist revolution in an independent Quebec. Pierre Vallières, who had collaborated with Trudeau as the young editor of Cité libre in the early sixties, currently dwelt in a jail cell, where he faced charges of manslaughter for his role in radical separatist violence in the mid-sixties. Trudeau knew his enemies well—many had formerly been his friends.3

  As the sixties ended, Trudeau was angry. Those who knew him best noticed his mood. Thérèse Gouin Décarie, the psychology student he had loved passionately in the mid-forties and wished to marry, left him a note one day: “Pierre, our Pierre, what has happened to you? You always seem so angry. Your eyes are spiteful, and you appear mean.” Gently, she concluded: “We think so often of you.”4 Others less personally attached worried too. He had behaved badly with the press at the Commonwealth Conference in London in January 1969, he’d railed against news coverage on the Official Languages Act, and he’d walked out of meetings in western Canada (where bilingualism and economic difficulties made Liberals unpopular) when protesters confronted him with signs reading “Trudeau is a pig” and “He hustles women.”

  In August 1969, as Trudeau entered the Seaforth Armoury in Vancouver through a sea of protesters, one wearing an “NDP ski cap” came menacingly close and shouted: “You’re a mother-fucking creep.” Suddenly, the young man’s head snapped back, and the next day he charged Trudeau with assault. RCMP officer Victor Irving knew what had happened but testified that he “did not see the PM throw the punch.” Fortunately, his interrogator asked a narrow question that allowed him to treat the truth economically. In fact, although he did not see Trudeau lunge, he later admitted that he thought Trudeau had hit “the guy.” Still, in his view, the protester “got what he deserved.”5

  Trudeau’s shyness and reticence fitted politics awkwardly. The result was these sudden eruptions of anger that reflected his private fury with the demands that politics made on his privacy.

  Trudeau may have resorted to violence, but he deplored others who accepted it as a means to promote social change or revolution. Long before, when he was young, he too had dreamed of blood and revolution, but he had changed profoundly, even if his mentor of those days, Father Rudolphe Dubé, known better as François Hertel, still mused about violence as a force for change in Quebec. Trudeau would have none of it. He later told journalist Jean Lépine that the frequent bombings in Montreal, the increasing labour violence in Quebec, and the open support for revolution by the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) caused him to ask the police to investigate the links among terrorists within Canada, their international connections, the role French officials played in promoting terrorism, and more controversially, the infiltration of the PQ by those who wanted revolution, not democratic change.6 He also worried about the troubling absence of leadership in the province, and as an election loomed, he urged Liberals to revitalize the party in Quebec.

  The surprising resignation of Charles de Gaulle in April 1969 did not alter French policy toward Quebec and Canada. The provocative, meddlesome attitude already displayed was deeply ingrained within the French bureaucracy, and the new president, Georges Pompidou, hesitated to break any ties with his eminent predecessor.* Having concluded that the Union nationale was too fond of the French and too willing to play their games, Trudeau sought alternatives. He needed a new Liberal leader in Quebec to work with him against French interference and the increasing turbulence within the province. Once Jean Lesage resigned as Liberal leader in September 1969, three candidates quickly emerged to replace him: thirty-six-year-old economist Robert Bourassa, conservative lawyer Claude Wagner, and veteran journalist Pierre Laporte. Wagner was the angry hardliner, invariably pointing out in his campaign addresses that fifty bombs had exploded in the province in 1969, including one in Mayor Jean Drapeau’s home. In response to Wagner, Bourassa emphasized an open economy, economic modernization, and “political realism”—a platform most congenial to federal Liberals. Bourassa won the leadership decisively in January 1970, and on March 12 an increasingly frustrated Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand called an election. He showed poor political judgment, as polls soon revealed that his own party had fallen to third place behind the Liberals and the PQ.7 The federal Liberals quietly threw their resources behind their provincial counterparts; the French apparently offered the PQ $300,000—which Lévesque wisely refused.8

  The election campaign did not go as well as Trudeau and Bourassa had hoped it would. The PQ rose steadily in the polls, with one poll the week before the election showing the Liberals at 32 percent, the PQ at 23 percent, and the UN trailing at only 16 percent. Lévesque had momentum. One investment firm urged clients to move their money out of Quebec, and on April 26, three days before the election, Royal Trust hired nine Brinks trucks to ship securities from the province. In the end Bourassa prevailed, winning 72 of 108 seats. The UN formed the official Opposition, with 17 seats but only 19.6 percent of the vote, while the PQ won just 7 seats with 23 percent of the vote. “In giving you their support,” Trudeau wrote to Bourassa after the election, “it is clear the people of Quebec have accepted your option: the path of work, of reason, and of confidence.”9 As the English-language press celebrated and federal Liberals breathed more easily, Jacques Parizeau, a defeated PQ candidate himself, cautioned that the jubilation was premature and tantamount to waving “a red flag in front of a fuming bull.” He warned ominously that the PQ’s virtual exclusion from the National Assembly, despite its strong vote, represented “the defeat of our arguments in favour of the parliamentary system.”10

  As Parizeau had warned, the election brought no peace. Bombs punctuated the Montreal summer of 1970, and FLQ calls for revolutionary action appeared on signposts, vacant buildings, and broadsheets scattered around the universities and the student bistros. Rumours of kidnappings, thefts of weapons and dynamite, and declarations of revolutionary solidarity abounded. The Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU), which Marchand had led and for which Trudeau had served as legal counsel, regularly paid the bail for the release of FLQ members, including Pierre Vallières, who used the occasion to issue a call for a Cuban-style revolution. A strike by Montreal taxi drivers in midsummer brought the army to the outskirts of the city.

  The Bourassa government could not find its footing on this dangerous terrain. It seemed divided within, as some of its own officials told their counterparts in France that the centralization policies of the Trudeau government were undermining the “last chance for accommodation.” On October 5, two days after these comments were made, a pair of gunmen grabbed British trade commissioner James Cross at his home on Montreal’s prestigious Redpath Avenue and pushed him into a waiting car.11

  Trudeau was “stunned.” Despite the summer of bombs and violence, he and his government were not prepar
ed for this dramatic kidnapping of a senior diplomat in the prosperous heart of English Montreal. Still, his reaction was immediate: the government must not give in to terrorists. As he later explained: “The reason is simple: if we had agreed, as the FLQ demanded, to release from prison FLQ criminals who had been convicted of murder, armed robbery, and bombings, we would have been putting our finger into a gearbox from which we could never get it out. Puffed up by the success of their tactic, they would have no reason to hesitate to murder, rob, and bomb again, since if they were caught, all their pals would have to do is kidnap someone else to have them released from prison—and on and on indefinitely.”12

  The FLQ immediately announced that it would kill Cross if the government did not stop the searches, free twenty-three “political prisoners,” broadcast the FLQ manifesto, give the kidnappers $500,000 in gold bullion, and arrange sanctuary in Algeria or Cuba. Because Cross was a diplomat, External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp took responsibility for the “negotiations.” He told the House of Commons on October 6 that the government, after consultation with the British and Quebec governments, had rejected the FLQ demands.13