Just Watch Me

by John English

  By the time Trudeau met with the caucus on November 8, he was in full control, and he made sure that any criticisms “were … couched in terms of future action rather than past recrimination.” His eyes coldly penetrating, his focus clear, his determination striking, he rallied his forces for the future war. The caution and defensiveness that had marked his first government disappeared, even with regard to the prime minister’s residence. Earlier he had prevented Margaret from making much-needed renovations to the rambling old building, but immediately after the election, he gave her a hug and said: “You’re off. Now get going with that house decoration.” He planned a long stay at 24 Sussex.19

  It was all a masterful performance. “Surprisingly,” Liberal Party historian Joe Wearing writes, “a national executive meeting following the election agreed that anti-Trudeau feelings had not been a significant factor in the results, even though many Liberal candidates thought so and surveys by Gallup and Radio-Canada indicated that an anti-Trudeau vote was the most commonly held reason for Liberal losses.”20 But Trudeau, in his own words, “refused to see himself as a loser,” and his determined belief caused most Liberals, if not others, to agree. What he later called his “half-failure” in 1972 began to “take on the aspect of a challenge that had to be met,” and he found himself mentally rolling up his sleeves. As he expressed it, “I felt charged with the spirit of combat that had eluded me throughout the election campaign.” Wearing an Aboriginal buckskin jacket for his post-election call on Governor General Roland Michener, where he agreed to form the incoming government, Trudeau drove his sleek Mercedes convertible across Sussex Drive to Rideau Hall to emphasize that “we were treating the results not as a defeat but as a challenge, and there was no question in my mind of giving up.”21

  Although the Liberals had lost almost a third of their seats, surprisingly few ministers had fallen on election night. Nevertheless, the outcome required major changes in the Cabinet. The “welfare backlash” meant that Bryce Mackasey had to go, even though the feisty Irish Canadian was a favourite of the prime minister because he, unlike most others, “made Trudeau laugh.”* Small businessman Bob Andras, who wanted to “rid” the party of its “socialism,” replaced him as the minister of manpower and immigration. His appointment placated the commentators on the business pages, but the surge of the NDP and the defection of prominent Liberals such as Kierans and Gordon over the economic nationalism issue demanded a response. Trudeau therefore promoted Herb Gray, the author of the report on foreign investment, to be minister of consumer and corporate affairs.† Alastair Gillespie became minister of industry, trade and commerce, a post that the defeated Pepin had headed very successfully.22 It was an excellent appointment, as Gillespie was not only a highly respected Toronto businessman but an economic nationalist as well, one who had successfully managed Walter Gordon’s firm, Canadian Corporate Management.

  In terms of influence, Trudeau more than made up for Pepin’s loss in Quebec by appointing Jeanne Sauvé, Trudeau’s first female minister, as Gillespie’s successor as minister of state for science and technology and Marc Lalonde as minister of national health and welfare. Lalonde would become, as he had been in the Prime Minister’s Office, a powerful force in government and one of Trudeau’s few political intimates. Trudeau also did as well as possible with the meagre Liberal returns from both the East and the West. In Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan, he scored with the sole Liberal members elected—Allan MacEachen, whose tactical brilliance Trudeau was beginning to recognize, and Otto Lang, who had a sharp legal mind and whom Trudeau liked and respected. MacEachen was an Ottawa veteran whose knowledge of House rules was unrivalled among Liberals. Although unilingual and usually taciturn, he gradually convinced Trudeau that he was a political asset of the highest value. Trudeau did less well in British Columbia and Manitoba: B.C.’s Jack Davis was a brilliant engineer and scientist but an awkward politician, and James Richardson was conservative and critical of his regime, as Trudeau already knew. The prime minister distrusted them both and believed they were not truly Liberal. As it happened, Davis’s defection to Social Credit in 1975 and Richardson’s to the Reform Party in 1987 gave substance to Trudeau’s original suspicions.23

  As the composition of Trudeau’s second government firmed up, its visage appeared comfortingly familiar and even conservative. The continuing presence of Turner and Sharp in the two most senior positions, Finance and External Affairs, reassured Bay Street and those who worried about the “socialists” surrounding Trudeau. In terms of education and experience, the Cabinet was one of the best ever forged in Canada. Davis, Lang, Turner, and Gillespie were all former Rhodes Scholars, and several others had advanced degrees or had studied abroad, mainly at British universities, including Energy Minister Don Macdonald (Cambridge), Sharp (London School of Economics), Treasury Board president Charles “Bud” Drury (Paris), Senate leader Paul Martin (Cambridge and Harvard), Lalonde (Oxford), and Trudeau himself (London School of Economics, Paris, and Harvard). The small number of American degrees is striking, and perhaps this gap created a resistance among the ministers to the new conservatism staking out its ground in the United States.

  No previous Cabinet had ever been so bilingual, although Cabinet meetings normally took place in English, except when Trudeau addressed a francophone minister. Despite the many complaints about “French power” in some of the anglophone media, Trudeau strengthened the Quebec presence by the addition not only of Lalonde and Sauvé but also of André Ouellet (postmaster general) and Jean-Pierre Goyer (minister of supply and services). The weak western representation led Trudeau to appoint the voluble Eugene Whelan from southwestern Ontario as minister of agriculture. He wore a green stetson everywhere except in the Commons chamber, where his joking flamboyance beguiled the press—if not always his colleagues. Like Mackasey, he was a favourite of Trudeau because he made him laugh; unlike Mackasey, however, the folksy Whelan was a considerable political asset.24

  Although the new government looked familiar and even cautious, Trudeau decided for several reasons that it should take a populist and progressive turn. First, he attributed his “half-failure” in the recent election to the ambivalence of many of the reforms during his first government. He had removed some but not all of the Canadian troops from Europe. He had taxed capital gains at 50 percent, not the full rate urged by the report of the Carter Commission. Several other projects such as the reform of laws on non-pharmaceutical drugs, the creation of a foreign investment review agency, and reform of the Indian Act and the Election Expenses Act had either failed or not been enacted.25 Sure, he could shrug off NDP member Ed Broadbent’s accusation that he was the most conservative prime minister of his lifetime, but defections of young people such as Bob Rae really stung him. Moreover, his young wife’s politics were certainly progressive, and they had an increasingly significant influence on him. A second major reason for this turn to the left was that to survive in the minority Parliament, the Liberals needed the New Democrats’ support. David Lewis had clear demands, mostly related to economic nationalist issues and unemployment policy.

  Moreover, the post-election analysis led ministers to believe that liberal principles had been buried in the campaign rhetoric and that, if they were to consolidate their leadership, they had better be progressive during this second government. In the first meeting of the campaign committee after the election, for instance, Jean Marchand charged that the party in English Canada had not defended bilingualism and progressive policies. Party president Richard Stanbury agreed, saying that English-Canadian MPs and party people “had run away from the various backlashes”—bilingualism and welfare and so on—and that it was time to attack that kind of thinking, “otherwise political opinion would polarize and we would lose all possibility of continuing a liberal and tolerant society.” Stanbury left the meeting with Trudeau, who, when they reached Trudeau’s car, thanked Stanbury for “his remarks,” saying he “had summed up the situation very accurately.” Not all agreed, but crucially, the
prime minister did.

  The final reason for his second government’s turn to the left was that the near electoral defeat caused Liberal Party veterans to rise up against what they believed were the cautious, abstract, politically inexperienced intellectuals who had dominated government for the previous four years. The heaviest protests came from Toronto, where Trudeau had lost the critical endorsement of the Toronto Star, whose founder, Joe Atkinson, had stipulated to his heirs that his “paper of the people” should support the Liberals only so long as they truly were liberal. In its place the first Trudeau government had won the support of Bay Street’s favourite, the historically Conservative Globe and Mail, but that had proved to be an unfortunate endorsement.26 And so the Ontario party power-brokers, working in the backrooms, now decided that the party must change direction.

  Years of infighting lay behind this move, but in the end, the Toronto group emerged on top. After the electoral disaster of 1958, a group of Liberals known as Cell 13 had taken control of the party in the metropolitan area and had made “Tory Toronto” Liberal in the sixties—a decade that transformed the conservative “British” city. The morning after the disaster of the recent election, a few ringleaders in the Toronto Liberal crowd, which had played hardly any role in the first Trudeau government, began to call each other in an effort to “save our party.” The lead was taken by communications lawyer Jerry Grafstein, a man of many infectious enthusiasms, and long-time party treasurer Gordon Dryden, whose rural Ontario dry wit and wisdom contrasted strikingly with Grafstein’s mid-city ways. They adhered strongly to a common Liberal opinion, vehemently expressed in the Toronto Star, that when out of office the party must lean to the left. Christina McCall describes their mood and beliefs:

  They believed implicitly that whenever the Liberal Party turned right—as they thought it had in the first Trudeau régime—it lost its way and its natural constituency. Grafstein and Dryden decided during that post-election conversation that something had to be done to save the party from the forces of reaction, and they set about convening a meeting of Liberal friends in Grafstein’s office on Richmond Street West to decide just what that “something” should be.27

  Not unexpectedly, it turned out to contain far more politics and far less political theory and scientific management than Trudeau’s current advisers were likely to expound.

  Trudeau needed no prod from Toronto. He had already begun a “housecleaning” of his office. Jim Davey, who had expected to be Lalonde’s replacement as chief of staff and who had won the affection of both Margaret and his own personal staff, was moved over to the Department of Transport, far away from the centre of power.* His replacement as program secretary was defeated Toronto MP John Roberts, while another defeated Toronto MP, Martin O’Connell, took over from Marc Lalonde. Both men fit the earlier mould: they were fluently bilingual and had academic doctorates and intellectual interests. However, as politicians, they also knew that successful elections came from endless coffee party chatter, constant knocking on doors in the evening, and early morning handshakes at factory gates. Trudeau realized that the defection of Walter Gordon had hurt his party, and in adding O’Connell to his office and Gillespie to his Cabinet, both of whom had worked closely with Gordon in the past, he hoped to reopen lines of communication not only with Gordon but also with the Toronto Star.28

  The Toronto group’s suggestion that Trudeau ask Senator Keith Davey to be campaign manager initially met with resistance from the prime minister—or at least delay. Davey claims that Trudeau called him a few days after the election to thank him for not “going public” with his criticisms and to ask him to meet with Marc Lalonde. In the meantime, Roberts arranged a dinner at 24 Sussex for the Toronto group promoting Davey, which included former Pearson aide Jim Coutts, former MP Bob Kaplan, Jerry Grafstein, Gordon Dryden, lawyer Tony Abbott, and consummate organizer Dorothy Petrie. Trudeau barely knew these longtime party activists, but they did not hold back on criticisms of his record or on their demand that Davey be made campaign chair. Characteristically, Trudeau struck out at his detractors: “Look, when my friends and I came into politics, we had fire in our bellies—we wanted certain things for Quebec. But I don’t understand what motivates you guys. What’s in it for you anyway?” His guests became furious, but they respected Trudeau’s office and responded cautiously. According to Christina McCall, “Trudeau was skeptical, but he was also desperate.” Eventually, he asked Davey to serve as election campaign manager, and politics immediately became their mutual passion.29

  With a plurality of two over the luckless Bob Stanfield Conservatives and with more than half the Liberal seats from Quebec, Trudeau began to woo those who had resisted him on election eve. The Toronto Star was easily seduced. It greeted the Liberal program announced in the Throne Speech of January 4 as full penance for Trudeau’s earlier sins: “Stripped of his majority and humbled by the Progressive Conservatives, Trudeau and his Cabinet have rallied to produce a program for this session of Parliament—however brief—that promises the kind of legislation that almost certainly would have won him a decisive victory a few months ago.” Trudeau now “deserves a chance,” the Star concluded. Its nationalist editorial board warmed to the government’s promise to extend the proposed foreign investment review to cover all new foreign investment, to restrict the sale of land to foreigners, and to scrutinize foreign firms in Canada more carefully. Although the Star worried about the government’s failure to mention wage and price controls, it welcomed the further consideration of a guaranteed annual income and new grants for the disabled and the visually impaired.

  The Globe and Mail was less impressed, and its witty political columnist George Bain mocked the laundry list of promises in the Throne Speech:

  We’ve bills relating to field and stream,

  Another allowance-for-families scheme,

  For corporate immigrants; yet-new terms

  (We’re putting more natives on boards of firms).

  We’ve plans for improving the IDB

  And tightening the rules of the UIP

  And still to make sure that we’re back in grace,

  Oh, see how we’ve wrapped in a fond embrace,

  A threesome which simply ensures our health—

  The Mounties, the Queen, and the Commonwealth.

  But it might not be enough, he averred. Trudeau needed to win the West, and he remained unprepared. Bain illustrated his point:

  Western Liberal: Do you know how the West was lost?

  Pierre E. Himself: No, but if you hum a couple of bars,

  I can fake it.

  Trudeau soon proved Bain’s point.30

  The Throne Speech appeared to be a good program, and it certainly secured the government time, but in the January 1973 debate on it, Trudeau lost his temper and attacked the opposition for pandering to English-Canadian “bigots”—an attack he described much later as “probably the most unpopular thing I ever did in the House.” In defence of his outburst, he told an interviewer that his “rational” approach had not worked. He had tried to “fight with a sword when the enemy was fighting with a bludgeon.” He vowed in the future not to be so subtle: “If they want blood and guts, I’ll give them blood and guts.” Although Trudeau, Marchand, Lalonde, and many (but not all) of the francophone press read the election results as a reaction to official bilingualism, they probably exaggerated its impact on the polling results. Nevertheless, the language policy definitely affected the Ottawa area and, to a lesser degree, western Canada. In his 1980 biography of Trudeau, Richard Gwyn, who himself worked in Eric Kierans’ office in the first Trudeau government, makes a strong and succinct case for the clumsy administration of the bilingual policy and for its negative political impact. He understood well its importance for Trudeau: “Bilingualism is the ‘Calais’ written on Trudeau’s heart. This is the passion behind his reason: the man inside the mask.” He describes the agony of fortyish anglophone public servants going across the river to Hull, where “they were chattered at b
y 600 language teachers, sometimes to be reduced to tears by petites Québécoises who were either separatists or feminists or both, and who delighted in their chance for revenge.”31

  Bilingualism was, in Gwyn’s witty but politically incorrect phrase, a “frog in the throat” of many Canadians. Moreover, Official Languages Commissioner Keith Spicer himself later pointed out, to Trudeau’s irritation, that much of the money for bilingualism was badly or wrongly spent, that the results were disappointing (with only 11 percent of public servants who took courses attaining full fluency), and that the money would have been better spent on training young people who, thanks to declining university standards, were taking French less in the seventies than in the sixties. Spicer’s 1976 report coincided not only with the election of the Parti Québécois, which opposed official bilingualism, but also with a nasty dispute about the use of French in air traffic control, which bigots used as an excuse to rant on radio talk-shows in many parts of English Canada.32

  Yet the evidence is weak that official bilingualism substantially hurt the Liberal Party either in 1972 or later. John Meisel, the astute analyst of Canadian voting behaviour, concluded after a careful examination of polling data from the 1972 election that “anti-French sentiments do exist in English-speaking Canada” and such views affected votes, but that “all the available data [on the 1972 election] nevertheless show that there was hardly more than a trace of this influence except in a very few special areas”—such as Leeds, in eastern Ontario, where there was a dispute about the local Customs Office, or Ottawa, where civil servant anger was real. Meisel further argues that the bilingualism policy probably helped the Liberals in many areas—notably, Quebec, New Brunswick, and francophone parts of Ontario.