Just Watch Me

by John English

  Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall claim that “the myth of Trudeau as the national saviour who knew how to deal with Quebec was broken” when Victoria failed. Other critics argue that the compromise over family allowances offered in 1972 might have saved the agreement. Perhaps—but the vehemence of the reaction and Bourassa’s divided Cabinet suggest that such hopes were probably illusory. Often, Trudeau and his ministers wistfully dreamed of what might have been if Bourassa had said yes. Turner, who had crossed the country many times speaking with the premiers, believes that the changes that came later—the rise of the West, the demand for Aboriginal rights, and the growing diversity of English Canada—meant that Victoria represented a brief shining moment, a rare opportunity that was missed. Yet acceptance of the Victoria Charter would have created a tumult in Quebec, which was already roiled by political divisions, economic disorder, and recent memories of assassinations and troops in the streets. Testifying before the Senate in March 1971, Léon Dion, the co-director of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, warned that “in the case of Quebec francophones, even in the best of contexts, one cannot predict what their final choice will be.” For Trudeau, Victoria was a profound disappointment and Bourassa a lost hope. For both men, 1971 was a difficult year.18

  The old problems persisted. In Quebec, bilingualism became a hotly contested issue as the ever stronger Parti Québécois asserted that French must be Quebec’s language of work and that immigrants’ education should be in French, rather than English. Bourassa tussled with radical unions, fiery nationalists, and immigrant groups, all of which furiously resisted his government’s language bill aimed at promoting the use of French in the workplace and in all schools except those in predominantly anglophone areas. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s Official Languages Act, which dealt with federal institutions across the country, received only mild approbation in the French-language media as a step forward for francophones. Progress on bilingualism came slowly in Ottawa, where the English language and anglophone officials had dominated for so long. Language classes for senior bureaucrats in their forties were often ineffective, and the public service unions jealously guarded against any extension of bilingually designated positions. As Claude Lemelin wrote in Le Devoir in July 1972, the measures taken since 1968 “barely scratched the surface of English unilingualism in Ottawa; the proportion of francophones holding senior administrator positions in the public service barely increased; the thorny problem of naming functional bilingual districts has not been resolved; and the establishment of francophone work units has barely begun.”

  Trudeau did not disagree with these complaints, but he pointed out how different Ottawa was now from the “English Only” environment of the early fifties. He was right. Between 1966 and 1976, the percentage of francophones in the military and the public service doubled, and francophone communities outside Quebec gained dramatically through enhanced education rights, if not official bilingualism at the provincial level. Anglophones were complaining that “French power” in Ottawa denied them and their children jobs, promotions, and favours. Those English Canadians who had expected Trudeau to “put Quebec in its place,” and who had contributed to the surge in support for him during the October Crisis, abandoned him quickly once he made it clear that official bilingualism meant a transformation of the workings of the federal government.19

  Nevertheless, the politics of bilingualism were difficult. The Liberal caucus, especially MPs and senators from western Canada, beseeched Trudeau to stop suggesting that those who were troubled about French on cornflakes boxes should simply turn the box around. The events in Quebec, where the Bourassa government attempted to propitiate anglophone Montrealers by establishing nonconfessional school boards, set off an angry debate between nationalists on the one side and business leaders and anglophones on the other. Not surprisingly, this argument had an impact on the acceptance of bilingualism in other parts of Canada. Caught in the middle were Italian, Greek, and other recently arrived Canadians, who angrily insisted on the right of their children in Quebec to learn either of Canada’s two official languages. Unfortunately for Bourassa, most chose English. These debates troubled Trudeau, particularly the row over the role of French in the workplace and in education. Like his friend Frank Scott, who had been a member of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, he rejected the commission’s strong recommendations concerning the use of French as the working language in larger businesses in Quebec. Moreover, Trudeau had always been troubled by the emphasis on biculturalism, which he believed slipped easily into the concept of two nations. And now, in addition, there was a new complication.

  On October 8, 1971, Trudeau responded to the unease felt by groups neither francophone nor anglophone by announcing an official policy of “multiculturalism”—making Canada the first national government in the world to do so. The policy soon sparked a fundamental debate about society, nation, and human difference, a discussion that in the decades since, as Western societies have become increasingly diverse, has become international in scope. Sociologist Fernand Dumont, political commentator Christian Dufour, political scientist Kenneth McRoberts, and Le Devoir have all argued that Trudeau’s declaration of multiculturalism undermined biculturalism and Canada’s historically important duality. Others, such as American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Canadian novelist Neil Bissoondath, and Dutch-English social critic Ian Buruma, have worried about the impact of multiculturalism on the shared concepts of nationhood and, to some extent, on Western values of justice and human rights. Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has rejected “multiculturalism” as an idea to understand how we might better live together. It is, he writes, “another shape shifter, which so often designates the disease it purports to cure.”

  Political philosopher Charles Taylor and political scientist Will Kymlicka have placed the concept within broader questions of identity and rights, but they distance themselves from official multiculturalism in Canada. In response to several xenophobic incidents in Quebec, Taylor and historian Gérard Bouchard wrote a report for the Quebec government that embraced “inter-culturalism,” whereby traditional historical claims for the French language and culture take precedence in the increasingly diverse Quebec society. Finally, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and University of British Columbia economist John Helliwell suggest that “happiness” is found least in the ethnically diverse and wealthy cities of modern North America and more often in smaller, more uniform cities such as Saint John, New Brunswick, or the Saguenay region of Quebec.20 These debates are academic, angry, political, unresolved, and profoundly important.

  The significance of the debates as they relate to Pierre Trudeau lies in the choices he made in the early seventies that have deeply affected Canadian society and politics. In 1942 Trudeau had declared that the greatest threat to Quebec and Canada was immigration. A quarter-century later, Jean Marchand, who had shared Trudeau’s nationalist and nativist sentiments during the war years, convinced the Cabinet to end all racial barriers to immigration. Trudeau and Pelletier backed Marchand, but most Canadians at the time did not, especially in Quebec.21 Trudeau, like his colleagues and many other Canadians, supported more open immigration because he accepted the fundamental arguments of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and came to believe that a liberal society accepted all peoples as equals. The memories of Japanese-Canadian evacuation, Chinese head taxes, segregation by colour, and the exclusion and extermination of Jews were recent and haunting. Moreover, on a personal level, Trudeau was cosmopolitan in his taste, and he believed that the nation-state was obsolete.

  Other less theoretical and principled reasons contributed to the new official policy of multiculturalism. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had offended those Canadians who argued that the emphasis on French-English duality made them into second-class citizens. In response, Pearson had added two “ethnic” representatives to the commission to “safeguard” the contribution o
f “other ethnic groups,” and one volume of the commission’s report specifically dealt with the “contribution” of “other ethnic” groups to the country. It was well known, too, that “ethnic” Canadians were strongly supportive of the Liberal Party, with the notable exception of Ukrainian Canadians.22 In addition, in 1969 Trudeau’s government had issued a White Paper that proposed to abolish the Indian Act and to grant First Nations people “equal status and responsibility” to those of other Canadians. The proposal set off a firestorm among Aboriginal groups, who rejected it as an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream society, and this bitter reaction raised fundamental questions about citizenship and group rights.* In frustration Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, the minister responsible, abandoned the White Paper two years later, but the experience deeply affected both of them, particularly their views of individual and group rights.23

  In these ways, various streams, some of them torrents, merged to create Canadian multiculturalism during Trudeau’s first government. In September 1971 the Cabinet Committee on Science, Culture, and Information initially proposed a policy of official multiculturalism. When the full Cabinet discussed the matter on September 23, Trudeau was especially cautious, saying that the emphasis should be on self-help, not on federal government help, and that support should be given for cultural but not economic equality. With Cabinet support, Trudeau finally announced the policy on October 8 in the House. Because of its significance, his remarks merit close attention:

  It was the view of the royal commission, shared by the government and, I am sure all Canadians, that there cannot be one cultural policy for Canadians of British and French origin, another for the original peoples and yet a third for all others. For although there are two official languages, there is no official culture, nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly.

  The royal commission was guided by the belief that adherence to one’s ethnic group is influenced not so much by one’s origin or mother tongue as by one’s sense of belonging to the group, and by what the commission calls the group’s “collective will to exist.” The government shares that belief.

  The individual’s freedom would be hampered if he were locked for life within a particular cultural compartment by the accident of birth or language. It is vital, therefore, that every Canadian, whatever his ethnic origin, be given a chance to learn at least one of the two languages in which his country conducts its official business and its politics.

  A policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework commends itself to the government as the most suitable means of assuring the cultural freedom of Canadians. Such a policy should help to break down discriminatory attitudes and cultural jealousies. National unity, if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one’s own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions. A vigorous policy of multi-culturalism will help create this initial confidence.

  Far from a declaration of group rights, Trudeau’s announcement reflected his liberal individualism. Initially, it promised little more than what its critics suggested: money for folk dances, songfests, and parties.24

  The critics were many. With some justice, the Opposition denounced the policy as merely a bribe to potential Liberal voters. Bourassa had to cope with almost universal criticism in Quebec of the dilution of biculturalism and, in particular, Trudeau’s limited definition of “culture”—which was fundamentally different from that of the Quebec government and the nationalist intellectuals. The critical Quebec press and government joined the federal Opposition in claiming—again with some justice—that Trudeau’s multiculturalism undermined the concept of the two nations. English-Canadian nationalists were also upset. The traditionally Liberal and thoroughly nationalist Toronto Star said that “no immigrant should be encouraged to think that Canada is essentially a chain of ethnic enclaves like the New Iceland Republic that once flourished on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.” In his statement, Trudeau used powerful words and images to emphasize his meaning. It was no surprise that nationalists cast poisoned arrows at the document but little wonder, either, that Trudeau, the “citizen of the world” from his Harvard days on, enjoyed dodging these barbs and firing back.25

  Trudeau’s statement on multiculturalism reveals both strengths and weaknesses in his attitude and position. On the one hand, he agreed to recognize “other” groups as his political advisers insisted he must. He did so eloquently, thoughtfully, and politically, and the policy statement, combined with a speech to a large Ukrainian-Canadian audience the following day, soothed MPs concerned about too much emphasis on Canadian bilingualism. On the other hand, he shaped the statement in such a way that it was consistent with his carefully developed views on the role of an individual within society. In doing so, he could not resist remarks that he surely knew would inflame many in Quebec.

  So it was with many of Trudeau’s speeches, policy statements, and political gestures in the early years of his government. Unfortunately, commentators and Canadians more generally often missed his subtlety as they concentrated on the insults, innuendoes, and tirades his remarks provoked. His subtlety sometimes devolved into esoteric obscurity. When, for example, a reporter asked whether he had experienced a struggle of conscience as he invoked the War Measures Act, he replied: “In my own mind the importance of democratic movements not fearing to take extraordinary measures to preserve democracy … has always been established, both intellectually and emotionally. So I didn’t have to weigh back and forth the kind of struggle that goes on between Creon and Antigone, in Sophocles’ famous play about what is more important, the State or the individual. Democracy must preserve itself.” Few Canadians outside university classics and literature departments had heard of Sophocles, much less Creon and Antigone. The performance was impressive, but the political substance was missing. Trudeau would soon pay a price.*

  * This historic act guaranteed the equality of the French language with English within the federal government. Specifically, it guaranteed that francophones could have service in their own language from any federal agency in Canada in jurisdictions where they exceeded 10 percent of the population. The same guarantee applied to English Canadians in Quebec. Opposition leaders supported the legislation, although Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield faced a rebellion from some members who charged that the legislation “stuffed French down the throats” of anglophones. The act was very popular in Quebec, but the move by successive Quebec governments to make French the official language of the province and to restrict English-language education and public use caused a reaction among English Canadians.

  The Official Languages Act transformed the federal government, where the senior public service now works bilingually and the percentage of francophones in the service roughly equals their percentage in the population. In the 1950s, by contrast, francophones constituted less than 10 percent of the Canadian public service, and the language of work was, with few exceptions, English. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism played an important part in creating public support for the act, although Trudeau himself was skeptical of the commission’s work. He closed it down when it began to consider “constitutional questions.” In Jack Granatstein’s apt assessment, its “contributions in detail were not great; what it did do was to help prepare English Canadians for the necessity of change. That was a major achievement, immeasurable as it might be.” J.L. Granatstein, Canada 1957–1967: The Years of Uncertainty and Innovation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 255.

  * Influenced by American Native protests, the demands from Quebec for group recognition, and the American civil rights movement (as was the White Paper itself in a different way), Canadian Aboriginal groups quickly organized nationally and effectively to reject the White Paper. One of the most influential attacks came from Harold Cardinal, whose book Th
e Unjust Society (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1969) argued that Canadian “Indians” could find a place in the Canadian “mosaic” while rejecting assimilation (12). Trudeau ignored the White Paper in his Memoirs. Sally Weaver provides a fine study of the bureaucratic, political, and Native interactions that caused the withdrawal of the paper in her Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda 1968–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). A more recent assessment of the motives and legacy of this incident is Alan Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 65–71.

  * When Anthony Westell consulted Sophocles’ Antigone, he found that Creon of Thebes insisted that he was obliged to uphold the law at all costs. He ordered his niece, Antigone, to be entombed when she defied his orders. The gods did not accept that in doing so, he was acting in the best interests of the state, so struck him down. Creon’s last speech in the play is a lament: “All that I can touch / Is falling—falling—round me, and o’erhead / Intolerable destiny descends.” Westell notes that “it was a curious precedent for Trudeau to cite.” Anthony Westell, Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 261–62.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE PARTY IS OVER

  Trudeau’s fourth year, 1972, began with the Liberals barely ahead of the other parties in the December 1971 Gallup poll: they had 37 percent support, compared to the Conservatives at 33 percent, the New Democrats at 21 percent, and the Créditistes and others at 9 percent. The surge in Liberal support to 59 percent after the invocation of the War Measures Act had soon withered away.1 Trudeau had always known that the feverish euphoria of the summer of ’68, that moment everyone called Trudeaumania, would soon burn itself out and that his future success in Canadian politics would depend on his record as prime minister. As it happened, though, the achievements of his first government were mixed.