Just Watch Me

by John English

  Not surprisingly, given his frustration, Reisman had announced, on December 4, 1974, that he would quit his post. He refused to criticize the government publicly, but he told the Globe and Mail that he wanted “a better chance to fly on my own wings. And the style of government today is such that it is very difficult to do anything that fully absorbs [my] talents and abilities.” Jim Grandy, a deputy minister at Industry, Trade, and Commerce who shared most of Reisman’s views and whose position required the implementation of the Foreign Investment Review Agency, also resigned. He joined Reisman in an Ottawa-based lobbying firm, one of the first of the multitude of companies in which former bureaucrats advised business and other interests on how best to manage ministers and governments. Trudeau replaced Reisman with Thomas “Tommy” Shoyama, who had served previously in the socialist governments of Saskatchewan. For journalists, Reisman and Grandy became useful sources of informed and strong criticism of their former superiors and their policies.* By these means they fuelled the growing forces within the Canadian business community that were turning against the Trudeau government and its policies.6

  Meanwhile, Turner’s prestige continued to grow as journalists looked to him for leadership and speculated on who would be the first to go, Trudeau or Turner. On March 31, 1975, Turner wrote an article paying tribute to Reisman, which hinted, accurately, that Reisman thought government spending was out of control. Coming on the eve of budget preparations, it signalled to his colleagues that he understood Reisman’s desire to “fly on his own wings.” The voluntary process was frustrating, labour’s demands were too great, and Trudeau’s help was just not enough. Turner, an experienced corporate lawyer, was fully aware of the wiles of business and the demands on labour leaders. As Ron Graham, Trudeau’s later amanuensis, wrote, the world that Turner knew “usually required the Prime Minister to invite the labour leaders for a drink at 24 Sussex, say, or to slap the backs of the chief executive officers while preaching to them about their duty to the nation.” Trudeau, however, “was never comfortable using the prestige of his office to achieve his goals.” The tortuous process of drawing up the June budget confirmed the distance between the two men. The rift had already been demonstrated in January 1975 when Trudeau revealed in the House of Commons that he had taken advice from a select group of economists who had never even met with Turner.* The government’s economic leadership seemed in disarray—dispirited and uncertain.

  With the collapse of the voluntary effort and the approval of the Cabinet, Turner announced the “neutral” budget on June 23. Business response was generally favourable because of the investment tax credit, housing funds, and the reductions in planned government expenditures. Nevertheless, economist Thomas Wilson criticized the budget for “its inflationary and deflationary effects;” he warned that “the higher fuel costs would increase the rate of inflation and also slow down the growth in real economic activity.” Breton shared these views and told Trudeau that the budget was harmful and “stagflationist,” in that it contributed “both to inflation and, given current monetary policy, to deflation.” The problem resulted from faulty analysis by Finance officials. He feared that the budget would contribute, along with other factors, “to setting the stage for wage and price controls later in the year.” He was right: all through the summer months the players rehearsed their scripts and pressure mounted for the drama to begin. The lead role fell to John Turner—but then he hesitated. He made a list of “pros and cons” for his staying on in government, as he had several times before in the seventies, but this time the cons trumped the pros: Trudeau had not backed him on voluntary controls or restraint in a party that was increasingly and “dreamily left.” He decided that it was time to go, with his head held high, before he tripped on the snares in the stage before him.7

  Turner made an appointment to see Trudeau on September 10. They met in the prime minister’s historic East Block office, but there was no real communication between them. Turner offered his resignation and Trudeau asked about the bench or the Senate, but he offered no alternative ministry. The conversation fell flat. Turner left the office and immediately drafted his letter of resignation from the government. In Radwanski’s view, he left “because he had grown bored and frustrated working with a prime minister who didn’t particularly like him, who seldom praised him, and who refused to make him feel special.” Turner later told his early biographer Jack Cahill that the meeting illuminated the differences between them: “The guy is a Cartesian logician and I’m an empiric guy. I’m an Anglo Saxon. I’m not for codes and all that. I’m for working it out.” In an interview with Radwanski, published in January 1978, Trudeau was surprisingly frank. “I thought … the guy has a hell of a lot of qualities and why … should he stay in a job … when the boss or prime minister isn’t his friend and associate…. And when John told me, ‘I’m getting out because I want to have more time with my family and kids,’ to me it meant exactly that.”

  Journalist Vic Mackie, who had been “tipped off,” presented Turner’s side of the story in the Montreal Star one month later. Turner, he claimed, would have stayed, but Trudeau refused to woo him. He even told him that his resignation would mark the end of his chances to become prime minister. Not so, Mackie wrote: “It may have been the best move … to ensure that he eventually moves into the Liberal leadership if he should decide to make a bid for it when the time comes.” When Turner arrived at the Ottawa Rough Riders–Edmonton Eskimos football game in Ottawa one week after he quit, he was greeted with thunderous applause from the crowd of twenty-nine thousand—a measure of his personal popularity and the growing unpopularity of the government.8

  The Prime Minister’s Office responded coolly to Turner’s resignation letter, assuring him that because he “did not base [his] resignation on any policy disagreement,” Trudeau would continue to call on his “good counsel.” The Globe and Mail thundered its dissent beside a splendid cartoon showing a bedraggled Trudeau handing Turner a steering wheel for a broken-down car. “Thanks a lot. I’ll walk,” Turner says. The Globe declared that Turner was “unable to arouse the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues to the need for decisiveness to ward off the dangers of collapse. Mr. Turner has taken the only step left to him. He has bolted the either-or-and-on-the-other-hand lethargy of the Trudeau administration.”9

  Turner’s resignation was the tipping point for change. On September 5, five days before Turner resigned, Breton wrote to Trudeau: “It is difficult to know why virtually the entire Economic Establishment in Ottawa now favours wage and price controls.” Trudeau met with his Cabinet a week after the resignation and decided to follow the economic establishment, thereby reversing the pledge he had made so dramatically a year before. What had been planned as a careful realigning of ministries suddenly became a major Cabinet shuffle as Trudeau moved Donald Macdonald from Energy, where he had clashed bitterly with Peter Lougheed, to Finance. Despite his reputation as a progressive, Macdonald had strong Bay Street ties. In Christina McCall’s words, he “had never drawn the distrust from his colleagues that always clung to Turner’s glossy ambition like flies to sticky paper.”10 Previously, Macdonald had resisted the powerful urgings of the Ottawa economic establishment, but now he accepted Trudeau’s plea that he stay on as the government moved haltingly toward controls.

  Macdonald hammered out the details of the program but did not conceal his disdain for what he was doing when he emerged from a long Cabinet meeting on October 9: “The kind of restraints we have in mind are unprecedented in peace time,” he said. “We are moving into an era of government intervention in the economy. If you don’t find it as frightening as I do, then let me know.” Trudeau, who had held out until the end against controls, seemed to place the blame for controls on Canadians: “We assume that the people want the government to take action, and that’s what we’re doing.” He invited the provincial premiers to his home for lunch on Thanksgiving Day, October 13, and that evening, dressed in a banker’s blue suit for a special televised speec
h, told Canadians with earnest demeanour that he would not freeze wages and prices but would “control” the wages and prices for government employees and 1,500 of the largest industries. The goal would be to protect the weakest in society, and above all, to inspire “Canadians in great numbers” to “practise voluntary restraint.” It was, the Globe and Mail declared, “inflation control if necessary, but not necessarily inflation control.” It was neither good public policy nor a good performance.11

  An Anti-Inflation Board chaired by Jean-Luc Pepin, with Beryl Plumptre retaining and expanding her previous authority, would monitor wages and prices and roll them back where appropriate. Another agency was responsible for enforcement. After three years, the Canadian people would judge the success of these measures at the polls. Early responses were not encouraging. In the House, the Conservatives quickly reminded everyone of Trudeau’s assault on Stanfield’s similar proposals a year earlier: “Zap, you’re frozen!” The New Democrats, who now formed the government in three provinces and held the balance of power in Ontario, reflected the angry response of organized labour to the proposals. According to Keith Davey, labour leader Dennis McDermott had always said that he hated the Liberals but “really loved ‘that s.o.b. Trudeau.’” Once the controls were in place, Trudeau became a “turkey”—and any thoughts of McDermott as a potential Liberal candidate died. In a judicious assessment by public service economist Ian Stewart, the decision to invoke controls “seemed to have no support from any quarter. For much of the business community, the prospect of a reduction in cost pressures was tempered by its growing philosophical aversion to government intervention. For the labour community, relations with government, which had been characterized by growing unease, degenerated into open protests…. For the general public, the imposition of controls represented a dramatic political about-face, the breaking of an election promise that has been thought by many to have had an enduring effect on fundamental political support for Prime Minister Trudeau.”12

  Trudeau was unusually pensive that fall of ’75. Margaret was pregnant with Michel, who was born on October 2. Her emotional turmoil, always high during and after pregnancy, weighed on the marriage and on Trudeau’s concentration. Aides noticed that their briefing notes lacked the crisp corrections and annotations from the prime minister’s hand. The loss of Pelletier and Marchand’s estrangement hurt Trudeau deeply. For Pelletier’s Hochelaga seat, Trudeau turned to Pierre Juneau, a Cité libre colleague who had chaired the Canadian Radio-Television Commission with authority and grace. He became the new minister of communications; but then, unexpectedly, on October 16, three days after the announcement of controls, the voters of Hochelaga rejected him decisively in favour of a Conservative whom Pelletier had trounced twice before. Claude Ryan correctly observed that Trudeau, in choosing Juneau, had harked back to the ideas of the past and that a new generation had emerged in Quebec that he did not know. Soon polls confirmed what Hochelaga suggested: the Liberals were in political trouble. The November Gallup poll revealed that the party stood at 38 percent, the Conservatives at 32 percent, and resurgent New Democrats at 22 percent. That same month, when the Liberals met for their biennial convention, a surprising 19.2 percent voted in favour of a leadership convention—twice the percentage that had voted for review after the disastrous 1972 election. Trudeau was further humiliated when a rebellion among backbenchers and party loyalists forced Keith Davey, Trudeau’s apparent choice for party president, to back down when a yet unknown Maritimer, Senator Al Graham, announced that he would stand for the office.

  In the House of Commons, a series of scandals provided an unfortunate counterpoint to the calls for restraint. An Air Canada vice-president had purchased a villa from a holiday resort that had just signed a contract with the airline but had made no payments on the mortgage. Even more seriously, Senator Louis Giguère, a well-known Liberal fundraiser, had made $95,000 on a quick sale of stock given him by Sky Shops after it had received a government lease for duty-free operations at Dorval airport. When the RCMP went to Marchand’s parliamentary office to interview him about the lease on November 27, the former transport minister angrily ordered them away. He objected to a CBC crew accompanying the police, denounced the Mounties as acting above the law, and seethed, “I don’t want another CIA in this country.” Even the politically astute Marc Lalonde lost his cool: when questioned by Eric Malling of CTV, he retorted that “saying the French-Canadians are corrupt and the Italians are corrupt, only you, us, Wasps, are pure and honest, frankly, I think that is a lot of BS.” Of course it was, but that fall BS stuck.13

  Trudeau now seemed far away from the celebrations of July 8, 1974, when he, in an exquisitely casual beige summer suit, and Margaret, in a flowered sundress, celebrated his election triumph in a “strong and confident” Canada. He appeared even more distant from that 1968 spring morning when, as Canada’s new bachelor prime minister he had taken possession of 24 Sussex, bearing only two suitcases. Times had changed, dramatically so. Trudeau could not escape the general scorn for politics, stained deeply by Watergate in the United States and by Sky Shops and Marchand’s sad antics in Canada. The finest American chronicler of the times, the novelist John Updike, recalled the mid-seventies as a middle state between the sixties revolution and something darker, a time when “college kids had already pulled back from revolution and dharma, afraid of finding no place in the slumping economy and of getting shot in futile protest as at Kent State.”14 Two assassins tried to shoot Gerald Ford during his short presidency, but failed. In Quebec, Trudeau avoided large meetings because militant unionists would menacingly confront him at such assemblies. While there was no whiff of financial scandal around the prime minister, he was careless, especially when he called upon Canadians to accept restraint voluntarily. In the House of Commons, Conservative MP Tom Cossitt harassed him continually about his expenses, the private jets that whisked him away on weekends, and above all, the expensive swimming pool that was constructed beside the old mansion on Sussex Drive.

  Trudeau had been extremely parsimonious in his first term in office, but in 1972 he told Margaret she could redecorate the residence as she had wanted to do earlier. Then he decided that he needed a swimming pool at Sussex Drive, too. Just before midnight one day in late August 1972, Trudeau’s principal secretary, Jack Austin, along with Jim Coutts and Michael Pitfield, knocked on Keith Davey’s Ottawa hotel room door. They reported that Trudeau was insisting on a swimming pool, and they believed it would be politically disastrous. Davey must “bell the cat and talk [him] out of the idea.” Davey met Trudeau, but the prime minister was adamant: “Keith, you have often told me that I’m the meal ticket for this party. Well, what would you say if I told you that your meal ticket considered the swimming pool a biological necessity?” Faced with Trudeau’s obstinacy, the ingenious Davey thought he would secure a prominent medical authority who would declare, as Trudeau had suggested, that a daily swim was essential for the prime minister’s good health. In his quest for appropriate authority, Davey began with the eminent Dr. Wilder Penfield, but after numerous consultations on what “biological necessity” entailed, he ended with his own general practitioner, Dr. Henry Fader, who willingly attested to the need for the pool. Donations to cover the cost of purchase and installation were tax-deductible and confidential. Trudeau gave $10,000 himself, but the amount was only a pittance in view of the final cost—$275, 000.

  As the shovels dug up 24 Sussex, Tom Cossitt’s persistent attacks on the prime minister drew blood, not least because the MP had once been the president of the Leeds Federal Liberal Association and he had led most of its members out of the party just before the 1972 election. Although he denied that official bilingualism triggered this migration to the Conservatives, he was a stern critic of the policy and, not surprisingly, was loathed by Trudeau because of his views. Clearly a maverick, he garnered attention and respect in many quarters when he refused to support a substantial boost in MPs’ salaries—the product of an earlier all-party agreeme
nt. By the time the bill reached Parliament on April 8, 1975, inflation was rampant and calls for restraint were pervasive. The bill as proposed was less generous than the one initially agreed upon: rather than a 50 percent increase in the basic salary to $27,000, with a tax-free allowance of $12,000, the new bill provided for a still substantial increase to $24,000, with an allowance of $10,600. However, indexing to the industrial wage composite would begin earlier: 1976 rather than 1978. Most of the NDP members quickly defected, pointing out that old age pensions were indexed to the much more modest cost-of-living index and that the increases proposed for MPs far exceeded those of Canadian workers.

  Cossitt and three other Tories joined nine NDP members in opposing the bill, voting for a hoist motion moved by House of Commons dean Stanley Knowles, which was defeated 170 to 13. The thirteen became heroes, resisting the temptation, in the Globe and Mail’s words, “to seize for themselves a cozy, personal refuge from inflation and leave the country to make whatever sacrifices might be necessary to hold off the deluge.” The Liberal Toronto Star similarly attacked those who supported the bill as an “earnest band of grabbers concerned to make sure that the central problem facing Canada doesn’t erode their comforts.” These comments shook loose a few MPs from the coalition supporting the bill, including John Diefenbaker and Liberals Charles Caccia and former minister Bob Stanbury, but it passed on April 30. Immediately, it became a symbol of political excesses and Ottawa’s distance from the concerns of ordinary citizens.15

  Cossitt was a pest, but his relentless attacks wounded Trudeau. “On the one hand,” he declaimed, “we have the average Canadian facing the inflationary increase in the price of gasoline, which is a necessary commodity of modern life, and on the other hand we have the unreal world of the Prime Minister as he drives around in a choice of two chauffeur-driven $80,000 six-miles-to-a-gallon Cadillacs, with the taxpayers of Canada, of course, paying all his grandiose bills.” Or again, “We have the housewives of Canada continuously struggling with ever-rising food prices while the Prime Minister eats in an elegant style which, according to Government figures, is costing the people of Canada at least $15,000 this year alone. Perhaps he is even dining by candlelight, since in recent years he has purchased dozens of candles and charged them to the public purse.” Cossitt discovered that 24 Sussex bought enough rye whiskey the previous year to serve a bottle each day. There were, of course, answers to these complaints: the cost of security for Trudeau’s daily swims at the Château Laurier Hotel was exorbitant; the RCMP insisted on the bulletproof limousines; other national leaders spent far more on food and candles; and Trudeau did not drink rye, though other Canadians who came to 24 Sussex did. Globe and Mail columnist Scott Young mocked Cossitt’s attack. The price of a prime minister, he argued, is “going up like everything else.” What did Cossitt expect? “If the time ever comes when [Trudeau] goes to work on a bicycle after spending the morning hosing his Victory garden, tending a new batch of home-made beer and helping his wife freeze zucchini against the hard winter’s entertaining ahead, the rest of us will be in so much trouble that we’ll never notice.”16 No doubt his son Neil Young would agree.