Just Watch Me

by John English

  Moreover, Liberal weakness in western Canada long preceded Trudeau’s leadership and official bilingualism. West of the Ontario border, the Liberals had won no seats in 1958, 6 seats in 1962, 6 seats in 1963, and 8 in 1965. The true aberration was 1968, when Trudeau won 27, but even in 1972, his 7 western seats represented, by historical levels, a high tide of support. Furthermore, the Conservative and New Democratic Party leaders both strongly supported official bilingualism when challenged to do so in a parliamentary vote in 1973. When sixteen Conservatives rose to oppose the policy, they were booed from all corners of the House. Never again would the Tories choose a unilingual leader, and both of Stanfield’s successors were deeply committed to bilingualism—which by the eighties had transformed Canadian government. Trudeau, Gwyn concludes, “never made the only mistake that really matters: he … never lost faith.” Others came to share it. Official bilingualism is, for Trudeau, a lasting and magnificent achievement.33

  Meisel’s study of the 1972 election revealed that the major issue in the campaign was, in fact, the economy. He pointed to the poll carried out by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion, where potential voters identified major issues: the economy, inflation, and high prices stood first, with 37 percent, and unemployment followed, with 33 percent, while “the Government, Trudeau” and “relations with Quebec, Separatism” received only 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively—approximately the level of “pollution”(6 percent). In the Ontario constituency of Kingston and the Islands, where Progressive Conservative candidate Flora MacDonald carefully tracked campaign “issues” mentioned at the doorstep, only twelve of eight thousand respondents even mentioned “French-English relations,” and two of the mentions were favourable!34 After the flurry of attention surrounding Trudeau’s remarks about bigots in January 1973, the minority Parliament reflected ever more what the MPs had heard on the hustings the previous fall. The economy became overwhelmingly the preoccupation of Canadian politicians as powerful international currents converged on Canada and swept over its economic and political life.

  Earlier chapters have described how these strong currents formed during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War and American economic policies caused inflation to surge. Simultaneously, the European Common Market gained increasing strength as its protectionist agricultural policy roiled world agricultural markets and its common tariff stifled Canadian attempts to penetrate European domestic markets. In the early 1970s, Canada’s second-largest investor and trading partner, the United Kingdom, whose entry into the Common Market had been vetoed by France in the sixties, sought once more to join Europe. A clever Soviet purchase of wheat at low prices and a famine in Bangladesh at the beginning of the 1970s then triggered a series of events that led to a world food crisis, with unexpected shortages and threats of starvation. And on the eve of Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian troops stormed across the Israeli border. As the Americans rallied to help beleaguered Israel, Saudi Arabia led Middle Eastern states in an oil embargo against the United States through the newly established Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). As one of the world’s leading agricultural exporters and a major producer of petroleum, Canada’s economy benefited, but not all Canadians shared in the prosperity. It was not the first time in the century that the world’s troubles profoundly changed the Canadian political landscape.

  Trudeau, however, now had a world of his own—and he strove valiantly to keep some balance between his public and his personal life.

  The outside world entered 24 Sussex Drive only in the evenings, when Trudeau’s limousine brought him home to Margaret and baby Justin. Since their marriage, Trudeau had jealously guarded his family’s privacy, instructing his press secretary, Peter Roberts, to shield Margaret from prying reporters and gossips, and he enforced those rules ferociously. Foreign missions were instructed not to make courtesy calls to Margaret, “since Mrs. Trudeau … [would] not be attending official events or taking part in diplomatic activities.”35 Nevertheless, that first Christmas, virtually every Canadian newspaper’s front page featured Justin in swaddling clothes, held by his beaming mother while an adoring Pierre fastened his gaze on his child. In those days they clung closely to each other. Margaret nursed Justin until he was six months old, rising throughout the night to respond to his hunger. Cloistered by the gates, guards, and servants who swarmed about the old house and grounds, she took refuge in her newborn and in a room of her own in the third-floor attic, where Pierre’s wedding gift, a sewing machine, buzzed as its needle fashioned clothes for her and her child, her friends and family.

  Margaret underwent a metamorphosis in those days from a free-spirited “hippie” in jeans and T-shirts to a seventies earth mother who ate brown rice and wore billowing skirts with blouses that flowed. This clothing was mainly for her private time, which in the first years of marriage was considerable. However, Margaret acknowledged some demands from Pierre’s office too. A stunningly radiant woman, she learned to dress for the few formal occasions she attended. Norah Michener, the wife of the Governor General, befriended her and guided her through the appropriate garb for formal occasions, such as the Queen’s visit in the summer of 1973. Although Margaret thought the ensembles worn by the visiting royal were “dreary,” she actually learned a fashion tip from Queen Elizabeth. When Margaret’s carefully chosen hat blew off her head at the Vancouver airport, a lady-in-waiting quickly stepped forward with a hat pin, which the Queen, her very blue eyes gleaming with amusement, used to pin the hat back on. It was a touch that charmed the crowd.36

  Margaret initially loathed the cold, weathered mansion at 24 Sussex with its seven servants, who seemed ill prepared for her and for children. She particularly disliked the manager, Tom MacDonald, a former army valet with a “haphazard and indifferent touch,” and the head cook, a bulky woman whose “old-fashioned English” tastes brought “one long round of steak pie, chicken pie, meat loaf and chocolate chip cookies.” Pierre, who Margaret and other female friends claim ate with little regard to nutrition, soon witnessed a battle between the cooks and Margaret as she gradually imposed a healthier and more elegant diet for her family and guests at the official residence.37

  The Victorian mansion bore the charm and faults of its type. It had too many drafty, small rooms but plenty of coves and warrens where kids could hide. It lacked central air conditioning, and the window air conditioners could not cope with Ottawa’s midsummer heat waves. The furniture bore the stamp of postwar austerity and Victorian fustiness, and common features of North American prosperity in the seventies, such as a swimming pool, sauna, or fitness centre, were absent. Margaret gradually began bringing the old house to modern life in her attic retreat, but after the election, she took on the challenge of renovation with gusto—and with Pierre’s blessing.

  Pierre immediately adjusted some of his working ways and all of his playing time to married life. Children had always adored Pierre’s pranks and generosity to them, and his own children experienced his intense affection from birth. Justin was the first child born to a prime minister in office since John A. Macdonald and the first child ever to live at 24 Sussex Drive, which had become the prime minister’s residence only in 1951. Life at home revolved around the children—in those days with gurgles, playpens, and discreet turns away from people when Justin needed nourishment. The honeymoon soon vanished, as Margaret recalled, “under a blanket of diapers and small babies.” Margaret became pregnant again in the late spring of 1973. Alexandre “Sacha” Trudeau was born, like his brother, on Christmas Day, after “a long and painful night.”38

  Alexander Yakovlev, who had recently become the Soviet ambassador to Ottawa, relates a story in his memoirs that seems to indicate that “Sacha” was named after him. According to his account, the Yakovlevs, who quickly became close friends of the Trudeaus, told Margaret that “Sacha” was a nickname for Alexander. It is a popular French nickname too, and Alexandre was “Sach” in the family throughout his early years. A good nickname can, of cou
rse, have many authors—and Alexandre’s does.39 In any event, the astonishing coincidence of the first two Trudeau boys sharing December 25 as a birthday prompted mirth and amazement, but the births meant considerable strain for Margaret. Of her first thirty-four months of marriage, she was pregnant for eighteen, and her condition sometimes had consequences for her mental and physical health.* When the challenges overwhelmed her, she sometimes broke into tears; at other moments her nerves and anxieties silenced her. Yet whatever the faults of 24 Sussex and the exigencies of public life, after Justin was born Pierre’s insistence on privacy made havens of their home and, even more, their retreat at Harrington Lake. Gradually, however, the external world intruded ever more often, and Pierre’s well-entrenched habits persisted.40

  Although children demand highly flexible schedules, Pierre retained the ordered habits of his lifetime. As he always had, he would rise at 8 a.m. in their chilly bedroom—he always insisted on windows open—while Margaret buried herself in the covers and lingered a bit. Pierre read newspapers over a hurried breakfast while Margaret, in her own words, remained a “blob” until the children arrived. At 9 a.m. Pierre entered the waiting limousine and set out for Parliament Hill, where he often ran a gauntlet of well-wishers and ill-wishers before bounding up the two flights of stairs that led to his corner office in the Centre Block. He would immediately check with Cécile Viau, his personal assistant, who somehow kept close track of his activities with extraordinary discretion and ability. He then met with staff before beginning his meetings—which on some mornings meant Cabinet and on Wednesday mornings brought the party caucus.

  As with 24 Sussex, Trudeau had his office redecorated by a new friend, the Vancouver architect Arthur Erickson.41 The result was a spacious, elegant room with clean lines, luxury, and comfort. The light oak walls bore only a striking woodcarving of a black loon, but portraits of his family and Sir Wilfrid Laurier on his desk were immediately obvious to guests—as was a box of the chocolates that Trudeau’s sweet tooth craved. He often had a light working lunch after which, when the House was sitting, he prepared for the 2 p.m. Question Period. An aide briefed him for that session—it was usually Joyce Fairbairn, with whom he had a close relationship full of banter.* As he entered the House, he made a much-interrupted passage through milling MPs in the Government Lobby before taking his seat. He pored over documents, preparing for the coming assault from opposition MPs. At 2:15 they began, and Trudeau replied, sometimes with professorial dignity and detail, at other times with biting sarcasm and wit. Unlike Diefenbaker or his own colleagues Jean Chrétien and John Turner, Trudeau did not relish these moments in the House, and a few minutes after 3 o’clock he quickly escaped.

  More meetings followed—with the constituents of Liberal MPs, with party members seeking favour or position, or with ambassadors presenting credentials or saying farewell. As the day came to an end at 6 p.m., Cécile Viau would give Trudeau messages, personal letters, and a few documents to sign. He would then check with an assistant about his schedule for the next day before walking down to the waiting limousine.

  As always, Pierre was punctual, arriving home at 6:45 with a briefcase of files. He would quickly greet Margaret; kiss the boys, who would already have eaten; and leave for a jog. Once the swimming pool was installed, a swim replaced the run. As Margaret wrote in her memoir: “He swims forty-four laps, never more, never less, every evening.” That would take seventeen minutes. When the boys were old enough, they then joined him for fifteen minutes of training in the pool. At 8 o’clock, precisely, Margaret and Pierre would have dinner. Margaret later recalled those times: “Most evenings there were just the two of us, and that continued throughout our marriage. The other political families would have been annoyed to hear us: we talked about ideas and ideals, never whether Pierre should put more money into the health program. We always thought that once the babies grew up a bit it would change, and we would become sociable, but somehow it never did.”

  There were a few friends who dropped by: Michael and Nancy Pitfield, Hugh and Jane Faulkner, Tim and Wendy Porteous, the irrepressible Jacques Hébert (whom Margaret adored), and the Yakovlevs—whose intimacy with the Trudeaus, including dinners for four at 24 Sussex, attracted the interest of Canadian security officials.42 Nevertheless, the gap in age between Margaret and Pierre, their different interests, and Margaret’s weak French affected their social life. Some of Trudeau’s old friends did not welcome Margaret: she was too young, too free-spirited, and for some, too anglophone. Although Gérard Pelletier remained close to Trudeau, his wife, Alec, a close friend of Madeleine Gobeil’s, did not take to Margaret. At one dinner hosted by the Trudeaus, writes Christina McCall-Newman, Pierre responded to a comment that the table guests, who were old Montreal friends, should speak English with the offhand remark that Margaret wouldn’t understand them if they did—a report Margaret strongly denies. Nevertheless, Trudeau’s circle of friends changed dramatically with the marriage—and so did hers.43

  Occasionally, Trudeau would take a break, and he and Margaret would watch a movie or go out to a restaurant—often Lebanese, which Pierre much favoured, or Japanese. Normally, though, the four-course dinner at home was, Margaret said, followed by “three-quarters of an hour while, as he puts it, he digests.” They would listen to music, hang paintings, or carry out other small tasks. Then, the forty-five minutes past, Trudeau would bring out the briefcase. It was the habit of his adult lifetime. An earlier female friend recalled how surprised she was when they were on a holiday and she discovered him taking books and files with him to the beach each day. He seemed to enter a trance when he worked. Margaret could not interrupt him, and her night suddenly became lonely as he worked until “about midnight.” “Occasionally” she rebelled and “went off in a huff to visit friends.” Usually she sewed and nursed the babies until he joined her later in bed.44 The weekends brought freedom, especially at Harrington Lake, where the weekday structures collapsed: meals became casual, kids romped at will, and Margaret and Pierre gambolled in the lake once summer warmed the Gatineau chill.45

  Come Monday, though, it was back to the routine—and, for Trudeau, the problems of governing Canada in an increasingly troubled world.

  * Davey and Richard Stanbury were trying to recruit Judy LaMarsh to be a candidate once again. Since leaving politics bitterly in 1968, she had played a major role in the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. The lack of a female Cabinet member had been a glaring weakness in Trudeau’s first government, and the two political veterans saw LaMarsh’s return as a solution to this problem. With Davey in tow, she met with Trudeau on June 14. Davey opened with praise for her political talent, and Trudeau followed with a generous invitation for her to run as a candidate, but suddenly she rose and ended the visit abruptly, telling Trudeau he simply wanted to “hang her in the window of the butcher shop like a hunk of cold meat.” She soon left the Liberal Party, which, ironically, has a regular Judy LaMarsh dinner to raise funds for female candidates. Keith Davey, The Rainmaker: A Passion for Politics (Toronto: Stoddart, 1986), 161–62; Richard Stanbury Diary, privately held, May–Aug. 1971.

  * Trudeau’s book Federalism and the French Canadians (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968) had been a bestseller in the year it was published. In 1972 Ivan Head edited a collection of Trudeau’s speeches with the hope that a similar celebration of the prime minister’s intellectual range and insight would occur. It did not occur. Conversation with Canadians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972) did clarify some of Trudeau’s controversial remarks, such as the comment he made on December 13, 1968, when asked when he was going to sell western Canada’s wheat (102). Nevertheless, the book, with such headings as “The Human Instinct,” “The Challenge of Democracy,” and “The Threshold of Greatness,” reveals Trudeau’s apparent distance from the concerns of “ordinary” Canadians.

  * Trudeau’s remarks about candies occurred in Jean Chrétien’s constituency of Shawinigan. Trudeau, Chrétien claims, became excited about a
new parks program Chrétien was promoting and said that when he thought about it, he was reminded of Christmas, when children got “candies.” Trudeau used the English word “candies” as French slang in order to seem more colloquial, as Chrétien had been in his introductory speech. But like most Trudeau gaffes in the campaign, the press leapt on it and made Trudeau look bad. Jean Chrétien, Straight from the Heart (1985; repr., Toronto: Key Porter, 2007), 80–81.

  * Trudeau had the right to meet Parliament and seek the confidence of the House. If the Liberals had been defeated in the House, the Governor General could then have called upon Stanfield to try to form a government. There is ambiguity in these close minority situations, caused in part by the controversies surrounding the 1926 election (when Prime Minister Mackenzie King sought a dissolution that Governor General Lord Byng refused) and the 2008 election (when Prime Minister Stephen Harper successfully obtained a prorogation of the House before facing a vote of confidence in which a united opposition had announced its intention to form a government).

  * Trudeau reluctantly sent Mackasey to the back bench. Much later he said that “Bryce had a solution [for seasonal and endemic unemployment] and I think [he] should be remembered…. He had a feeling for the little guy, and that’s what I liked and that’s why I brought him into my Cabinet. He corresponded to my own view, as Marchand did, that we should help first those who need help most, and he was prepared to do it.” After the 1972 election, Trudeau asked all ministers to express a willingness to change posts. Mackasey refused, and so he was dismissed from Cabinet. “Interview between Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Graham,” May 4, 1992, TP, MG 26 03, vol. 23, file 7, LAC. The comment about Mackasey’s ability to make Trudeau laugh was made to me by former principal secretary Tom Axworthy. Pierre Trudeau, Memoirs (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993), 160.