Just Watch Me

by John English

  Trudeau’s closest aides, while admiring his reserve in public, recall his private distraction as his marriage passed through its final, agonizing months. Gossage wrote in his diary in May 1977 that one of the prime minister’s most senior aides reported that Trudeau had become “unusually and extraordinarily unpredictable.” Others recall that his usually incisive comments on memoranda became markedly fewer. In the Commons and whenever he jostled with the press, his edges were sharper, his emotions closer to the surface.* Others remember that the months before Margaret decided to leave were noticeably tense, uncertain, and difficult. Yet he told an interviewer in 1977 that after the separatist win in the 1976 Quebec election, “the fates” had cornered him. He could not leave politics, as Margaret wanted, when the “very execution of the task that I got into politics for” was in doubt.22

  The second question—whether the divorce caused Trudeau’s popularity to soar—can be answered with a definite yes. Ironically, the Lévesque triumph on November 15, 1976, which Margaret and, apparently, Pierre regarded as the final blow to the marriage, was offset by a remarkable outpouring of public and private sympathy for Trudeau when the elegant statement of separation appeared six months later. Although no scientific answer can be provided, and pollsters did not and surely could not frame a question to indicate exactly how much the impact of the marriage breakdown contributed to Trudeau’s increased popularity, the prime minister was never as popular as he was in the summer of 1977, except for that brief surge during the October Crisis. The polls immediately after the Lévesque victory had been disastrous for the federal Liberals. In January 1977 the Conservatives led with a big enough margin to form a majority government. Then, as Trudeau’s marriage came apart, a dramatic shift occurred.

  At the beginning of 1977, polls indicated that John Turner would be a far more popular Liberal leader, and pundits mused about Trudeau’s imminent departure. By June, however, no one doubted that Trudeau would remain and that he and Lévesque were now engaged in the fight of their lives.23

  While Trudeau’s personal life probably inflated his poll numbers in 1977, his own response to the separatist victory in Quebec in the early part of that year also played a part. After initially stumbling in his response to Lévesque’s win by reacting churlishly and even personally, Trudeau managed to gain strength as Lévesque overplayed his hand early in the new year.* When the new Quebec premier spoke to the prestigious Economic Club of New York on January 25, he sought to reassure Wall Street that the Parti Québécois represented no threat to American equity or bond holders. His task was admittedly difficult, given that the PQ was heavily dependent on union and leftist support and its program was avowedly social democratic. Still, Lévesque had given the key Cabinet positions to ministers whose background and beliefs reassured the business community—notably economist Jacques Parizeau, who became finance minister, and former civil servant Claude Morin, a “gradualist” who became intergovernmental affairs minister. The Quebec business community, traditionally dominated by anglophones, was deeply integrated within the North American context and was fearful of Quebec independence and the socialism of the PQ. According to a contemporary study, eleven head offices had left the province in 1975 and sixty-one in 1976, and the rate was quickening in 1977, while another study showed that Quebec-based stocks had suffered relatively greater losses than other Canadian or American stocks after the provincial election.

  Given this response, Lévesque needed to reassure his audience in New York, and he promised that Quebec would remain in an economic union with Canada and that separation would be implemented only after a referendum. He failed in his task. The next day New York Times editor James Reston described Lévesque as an excellent speaker but concluded that “he suggests some scary problems.” He had listened to the speech with “admiration” but also “regret,” for “the melody of separation, like the longing of the Scots and the Welsh for independence, seems out of date and almost tragic.” The business pages seemed to blame a sharp drop in the stock market on the speech, and both Moody’s and Standard and Poor announced that they would review Quebec bond ratings. A bitter Lévesque unwisely blamed a “fifth column” in the audience for destroying his positive message.24

  Lévesque had troubles closer to home as well. When he addressed the Montreal Chamber of Commerce on February 8, he lacked his usual eloquence and power, partly because of a gruesome car accident two days earlier when he had struck a body lying on a Montreal boulevard, but also because the New York speech continued to get bad reviews. He appeared “tired” and “visibly shaken” before the chamber, yet he spoke for one hour and twenty-seven minutes to little applause from a large audience. In contrast, when Trudeau had spoken to the Quebec City Chamber of Commerce on January 28, he had challenged the PQ to hold its referendum soon and had received a standing ovation from a crowd of 1,500 that rose and sang “O Canada.” It was a rehearsal for his main political act that winter.25

  In response to the new crisis, Trudeau accepted the recommendation of the Cabinet’s Political Planning Committee that he begin regular press conferences, weekly if possible.26 Although reluctant, Trudeau agreed with the recommendation and used one of the press conferences to deny that his upcoming address to the United States Congress, the first ever by a Canadian prime minister, would respond to Lévesque’s Economic Club speech. He would talk about “Canada,” not particular issues, he claimed.27 But there was only one issue, and Lévesque was at its core. Trudeau delivered the address on February 22, and it was immediately published on high-quality bond paper and circulated widely. He began with eloquent praise for the American experiment and experience. In particular he mentioned the “social revolution” of “recent years,” in which the United States had overcome “difficulties of immense complication and obdurateness … through the democratic process” and provided “a model for all nations devoted to the dignity of the human condition.” At this point Trudeau linked the historic road to freedom of African-Americans with the acquisition of legal, social, and political rights by the conquered French Canadians. Despite many achievements since Confederation, he said, French Canadians had not felt fully equal: “And therein is the source of our central problem today. That is why a minority of the people of Quebec feel they should leave Canada and strike out in a country of their own.” Trudeau then moved to reassure his audience: “The newly elected government of that province asserts a policy that reflects that minority view despite the fact that during the election campaign it sought a mandate for good government, and not a mandate for separation from Canada.”

  Trudeau argued that separation would be disastrous and was contrary to the direction the world must take. In the most memorable passage in the speech, he said: “Most Canadians understand that the rupture of their country would be an aberrant departure from the norms they themselves have set, a crime against the history of mankind; for I am immodest enough to suggest that a failure of this always varied, often illustrious Canadian social experiment would create shock waves of disbelief among those all over the world who are committed to the proposition that among man’s noblest endeavours are those communities in which persons of diverse origins live, love, work and find mutual benefit.” Then, as promised, Trudeau moved beyond Canada to the challenges faced by the continent and, more eloquently, by the world:

  “Even as we have moved away from the cold war era of political and military confrontation, however, there exists another danger: one of rigidity in our response to the current challenges of poverty, hunger, environmental degradation, and nuclear proliferation. Our ability to respond adequately to these issues will in some measure be determined by our willingness to recognize them as the new obstacles to peace. Sadly, however, our pursuit of peace in these respects has all too often been little more imaginative than was our sometime blind grappling with absolutes in the international political sphere. Moreover, we have failed to mobilize adequately the full support of our electorates for the construction of a new world order.”r />
  Finally, Trudeau, who long ago in his Harvard dormitory had disdained American patriotism, paid tribute to American leadership and called on Americans to reject George Washington’s warning that they beware the “insidious wiles of foreign influence” and steer clear of “permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Now, he said, Canada needed America. “Yet here I stand, a foreigner, endeavouring—whether insidiously or not you will have to judge—to urge America ever more permanently into new alliances.” He dared do so because of the bond between Canada and the United States and the spirit America represented. Building on this bold assertion, he concluded: “Thom. Paine’s words of two centuries ago are as valid today as when he uttered them: ‘my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.’ In your continued quest of those ideals, ladies and gentlemen, all Canadians wish you goodspeed.” Ironies abounded—Tom Paine had rebelled against the British Crown to which Trudeau’s Elliott forebears had remained loyal, Trudeau’s early years had been marked by a conservative Catholic’s disdain for the spirit America represented, and his first government had minimized Canada’s international significance—but the address adapted belief to the new realities of Canadian nationhood. It hit its mark clearly and effectively.28

  Press reaction in English Canada was strongly favourable, and Conservative leader Joe Clark, who had been sharply critical of Trudeau’s early responses to the PQ election, said he would have applauded the speech had he been there. NDP leader Ed Broadbent was even more generous, deeming it “sensitive and elegant.” In Quebec English-language journalists were predictably flattering, but francophones were critical of the soaring rhetoric and vague detail. To Claude Ryan, “the Washington speech will change nothing.”29 The criticism focused on the absence of any specific answers to Quebec grievances, but the overall approach Trudeau took in the speech marked a real difference in the federal government’s response to the problem, one that had been stirring ever since the separatist victory.

  First, the speech recognized the primacy of the Quebec issue for Canadian politics. The breakup of Canada was a “crime against humanity”—a declaration that raised the stakes enormously and cast the gentle conversation about economic union and consultative referenda to the side. By linking the Quebec issue to the broader international problems and by linking the fates of Canada and the United States together, Trudeau sought to internationalize the issue, as Quebec had done for a decade in its relationship with France. Trudeau knew that, for Quebec, the relationship with the United States was far more significant economically, and that it would ultimately be more influential with individuals as they decided whether to vote oui or non in any referendum.* There is impressive evidence that Trudeau’s speech had the desired effect. Reston wrote in the New York Times that Lévesque’s appeal to Americans to accept the “dismemberment” of Canada was the “worst proposition put to the U.S. Government since Nikita Khrushchev invited us to accept the emplacement of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba”30—bad for the United States; fatal for Canada.

  Second, Trudeau rejected responses that in his view would lead ineluctably toward significant decentralization within Canada. In the confusion following the Quebec election, to give but one example, Ed Broadbent broke with the NDP’s traditional centralist position and urged that decentralization be considered as a response, a view that the Liberal and nationalist Toronto Star surprisingly endorsed. Even more significant were the reactions from the provinces. During the Quebec election campaign, Alberta premier Peter Lougheed sent a letter on behalf of other anglophone premiers agreeing to discuss patriation if the division of powers in the British North America Act was also put on the table and significant powers passed to the provinces. Although Trudeau had once thought himself that, given the new challenges of government, decentralization and a tighter delineation of responsibilities were appropriate, the actual experience of government had changed his views. The oil crisis, with the subsequent sudden shift of wealth to the Canadian West, and the increasing demands from Quebec for more powers caused Trudeau to reply sharply to Lougheed’s badly timed letter, and he told him that any further meetings with the premiers would “prove of little purpose if the provinces merely seek to gain powers.”

  When the new Conservative leader Joe Clark echoed Lougheed’s and Lévesque’s demands for greater provincial powers, Trudeau took a clear stand against any such alteration. He replied bluntly to a student from Alberta at Oxford, who suggested that rewriting the British North America Act to give more power to the provinces might strengthen Confederation: “Well, it’s hard to understand how you would strengthen Confederation by weakening it.” Canada, he continued, “is already one of the most decentralized countries in the world, and you can go further toward decentralization, but then you are losing the notion of a country which can act in unison and you are beginning to work toward a Confederation of semi-independent states.” Eventually this long answer was trimmed down to a question: “Who speaks for Canada?” For Trudeau, the answer was obvious: Canada’s prime minister.31

  Third, Trudeau firmly rejected special status for Quebec within the existing federation, and he also refused the possibility of any special relationship after separation. In the first days after the Quebec election, special status seemed to many Canadians a preferable alternative to separation. The Toronto Star, which had firmly opposed special status in the sixties and early seventies, changed its opinion after the shock of the separatist victory. Trudeau had declared that separatism was “dead” many times after the 1973 Liberal victory in the province, the Star reminded readers, but November 1976 now proved it was very much alive, and a new response was necessary. The idea of special status won support among some English-Canadian intellectuals, particularly those associated with the New Democratic Party (whose endorsement of some type of special status had caused Trudeau to abandon the party in the early sixties). Within the federal Liberal Party, the notion of compromise was also favoured by some younger Quebec MPs, and immediately after the election, in the Liberal caucus, they expressed an interest in “special status.” The most vocal was Serge Joyal, but there were others who argued for an open approach (une attitude d’ouverture) toward the PQ. With the polls immediately after the Quebec election showing Joe Clark with a solid lead, a television interviewer asked Trudeau whether he should not listen to the dissenters and find some solution. No, he answered firmly: “In my government I don’t hold people by force or blackmail. They work with me if they share my views and my concept of what Canada is. If they don’t, they won’t have to go to war against me or kick me out. I’ll simply say, ‘Bye-bye.’” MPs, Trudeau reminded his audience, had known his views when they stood for election. He would discuss “an exchange of powers,” he said, “but don’t get the idea that I’m moving toward a view that is diametrically opposed to the one I’ve been preaching for ten years.”32 By Christmas 1976, no one doubted where Trudeau stood.

  Trudeau’s position had even greater clarity by March, a precious quality in a political world where shock and confusion reigned. Canadians betrayed great uncertainty as they spoke to pollsters, and in Quebec, even as voters supported a separatist party in November 1976, they told pollsters that they did not want separatism. Public opinion seemed like a weathervane, catching the strongest gusts. A Martin Goldfarb poll in May indicated that 33 percent of Quebecers would support “separation,” but the Gallup polls throughout the year consistently yielded results around 20 percent. CROP, a Montreal-based polling operation, put the figure at 19 percent in May, but when the question was rephrased to “independence with an economic association,” the percentage rose to 38 percent, with 50 percent supporting separation if the referendum simply asked for a mandate to negotiate “sovereignty-association.” To confuse matters more, a Radio-Canada poll in November indicated that the preferred choice of Quebecers was “renewed federalism.”

  Outside Quebec, opposition to Quebec separation was strongest in the provinces bordering Quebec, notably Ontario, and
opposition to special status and bilingualism was especially strong in the Prairie provinces. English Canadians told the Gallup poll by a margin of 54.2 percent to 38.3 percent that they opposed negotiating “special political and economic agreements with Quebec to try to prevent separation.” Yet francophones supported such negotiations by a margin of 66.9 percent to 23.2 percent. Likewise, when English Canadians were asked whether “the governments of Canada and the provinces [should] promote and finance more extensive bilingualism throughout the country to try to prevent separation,” only 27.8 percent agreed, while 64.1 percent opposed such a policy. With francophones, the percentages were almost exactly the reverse: 56 percent yes, 33.1 percent no. On the one hand, the ambiguity of these answers gave Claude Morin in Quebec the freedom to develop his gradualist approach to separation through a carefully worded referendum; on the other, it gave Trudeau freedom to lead rather than follow.33 That freedom allowed him to capture public imagination—for a while.

  In the early winter of 1977, Christina McCall wrote in Saturday Night: “Like him or not, much of what happens to Canada in the next few years will depend on Pierre Trudeau.” He was “the champion of the federalist cause,” she said, “and we are the uneasy bystanders.” She agreed that in the words of Conservative senator Grattan O’Leary, “fortune has a way of turning in his favour.” McCall, who wrote the best study of the Liberals in the seventies, believed that, like Churchill in 1940, the defeated man had found his moment and his challenge. Individuals, she wrote, determine the course of history as much as ideology.34 The turn of Trudeau’s fortune in early 1977 was an astonishing reversal from what had been a dreadful period for him and his government. His marriage crumbling, his dream threatened, Trudeau now faced his greatest challenge.