Just Watch Me

by John English

  In his campaign for the Liberal leadership, as in the election campaign of 1968, Trudeau refused to speak out against Vietnam (as he had earlier urged Pearson to do), hesitated to renounce NATO and NORAD with their nuclear weapons (as he had angrily demanded in 1963), and stayed clear of any hints of a Scandinavian neutralism (which had intrigued him earlier). Instead, he satisfied his critics by promising defence and foreign policy reviews, recognition of Communist China, and more attention to international development. These policies represented no break with Pearson’s tradition, but the difference came in Trudeau’s frequent declaration that Canada should concentrate on its own interests and not be driven in its international activities by multilateral institutions and commitments. Canada should no longer be a “helpful fixer” for the world; it was now time to heal itself.

  Thus Trudeau—the cosmopolitan who spoke several languages and fancied himself a “citizen of the world,” the advocate who had lectured earnest audiences in the fifties on the importance of international policy—now told Canadians that their country and its economic and political interests must come first. Defence of the continent was the proper role for the military; advancement of trade and the economy was the principal task of Canada’s foreign service officers; and strengthening Canada’s internal institutions was the major concern of government. Like Mackenzie King before him, Trudeau took refuge in ambiguity and evasion. In summarizing Trudeau’s approach in 1968, historian J.L. Granatstein, who at the time supported withdrawal from NATO and greater independence from the United States, wrote: “The only charitable solution to unravelling the tangle of Trudeauvian statements on defence policy seemed to be that he was deliberately taking all sides of all questions so that, when the review was completed, he could find support for its decisions somewhere in his past remarks.”3 There is some truth in the charge.*

  The primacy of domestic over foreign politics is clear in the Cabinet records of Trudeau’s early years—and it brought a certain consistency to his first government. When, for example, Paul Martin vigorously defended a continuing Canadian role in NATO, Trudeau responded that one-sixth of the total budget was spent on defence, and as the Cabinet members tried to reduce that expenditure, they were hampered by the inflexibility of this NATO commitment. In a remark that surely irritated not only Martin but also External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp and Defence Minister Léo Cadieux, Trudeau mused: “Could the forces be used to build highways, to solve problems of pollution as cadres for social development?” He wanted to retain “freedom for spending,” especially as the demands of Canada’s social security system, where transfers to the provinces had risen dramatically since 1965, were already challenging budgetary planning. In the end, Trudeau compromised and accepted a significantly reduced presence in Europe for the Canadian military, along with a new focus on Arctic sovereignty and Canada’s borders. Just as the Germans defended their homeland, Canada would protect the “peculiar ecological balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the Arctic archipelago.” “We do not doubt for a moment,” he presciently told the House of Commons in October 1969, “that the rest of the world would find us at fault, and hold us liable, should we fail to ensure adequate protection of that environment from pollution or artificial deterioration.”4

  In his first years, Trudeau said little at Commonwealth gatherings, avoided pronouncements on foreign policy, and allowed the foreign and defence policy reviews to end with a whimper in Cabinet, thus preventing explosions in the land. Although he developed a taste for political foreign travel and even conversation with foreign leaders, he avoided commitments. During his trip to the Soviet Union in 1971, for example, he recoiled when the Soviets asked him to sign a protocol calling for yearly meetings. Like his extremely cautious Liberal predecessor Mackenzie King, he rejected any notion that Canada was a “great power,” adding that he—and Canada—could only “react to those things which are essential to us.” To punctuate his point, he added: “We’re not, in other words, trying to determine external events; we’re just trying to make sure that our foreign policy helps our national policy.” Where challenged, Canada would respond ferociously, notably to intrusions by French diplomats, politicians, and agents in Canadian affairs. Here foreign policy did become an important tool in helping “our national policy.” But in the whirlwind of multi lateral diplomacy, the preferred action appeared to be a tentative withdrawal from world affairs.5

  The Soviets, who brushed over domestic concerns while pursuing global ambitions, were surprised to see a national leader reject “greatness” when it was thrust upon him. With Trudeau, it reflected his willingness to compromise on his own beliefs in order to advance what he correctly believed was his prime political interest. Those policies he would have favoured had he been writing articles for Le Devoir in the late sixties—opposition to Vietnam, withdrawal from military alliances, rejection of nuclear weapons for Canadian forces, and radical reduction of the Canadian military—were politically impossible for the leader of a party that carefully balanced strong Quebec support with generous contributions from Bay Street and votes from urban and middle-class suburbs of English Canada. Sometimes the ambiguity did slip away, as when he taunted diplomat Charles Ritchie that Canada no longer needed the Department of External Affairs, suggested that reading the New York Times was more useful than diplomatic dispatches, or directed Ivan Head and a group of younger officers to rewrite the initial defence and foreign policy reviews, which largely supported existing policy.

  It was not only the Constitution and Quebec but also the difficult economic challenges of the seventies that kept Trudeau’s governments fastened mainly on domestic affairs. Canadian nationalism was a wild beast in those times, one whose protectionist and anti-American directions Trudeau feared. With Richard Nixon as president, most Canadian prime ministers would have kept a wary distance because of his unpopularity in Canada and his unpredictable behaviour. Trudeau was sufficiently shrewd to realize that Canada’s relationship with the United States was the principal foreign policy concern, and he trod diffidently as a result. Canada under Trudeau chose its initiatives carefully: the law of the sea; protection of Arctic waters; advancement of détente and human migration through the Helsinki agreements; mediation within the Commonwealth; and development of a “third option” to the close economic embrace of the United States. In these initiatives, described well by Trudeau and Head in their memoir The Canadian Way, Trudeau’s intelligence, linguistic abilities, and personal charm usually advanced Canadian interests.

  Those qualities became more widely visible when Canada joined the G7 in 1976 and Trudeau developed, for the first time, close personal ties with major Western leaders, most notably President Jimmy Carter and German chancellor Helmut Schmidt. With the election of René Lévesque, Trudeau took advantage of his ties with Carter to ensure American support for a united Canada, and he capitalized on his long tenure in office to contrast his international experience and reputation with those of the new Conservative leader, Joe Clark. In a series of initiatives, he called for general nuclear “suffocation” in all countries and acted as a mediator between the wealthy Western democracies and the developing world. He clearly revelled in his much greater exposure on the world stage, particularly his role within the G7. For a while it seemed that the hesitant internationalist might become a major figure on a global stage where actors from the developing world were not fringe players. But it was too late; Clark’s triumph in the spring 1979 election ended those dreams.6

  Writing in 1981, three Canadian academics praised Trudeau’s recent international activities and his accomplished style but concluded that “the image which persisted among many [is] still that of Trudeau the new prime minister, sliding down the banister at an early meeting.” In support of their argument, they pointed to a 1978 special issue of the International Journal in which the various authors expressed their sharp disappointment with Trudeau’s foreign policy. In the lead article, Harald Von Riekhoff, a pol
itical scientist at Carleton University, summarized the general opinion: “In assessing Trudeau’s impact on Canadian foreign policy, we are … dealing with a residual function of his over-all political activity and hardly the one which will determine his place in Canadian history.”7

  The analysis was unfair. In the 1970s Canada had achieved significant advances in specific areas, although the glamour of the golden age of Canadian diplomacy was admittedly lacking in this workmanlike approach to international issues.* In the eighties the international scene looked less promising for Canada. When Trudeau returned to office in the winter of 1980, a Quebec referendum was in the offing, the Canadian economy was perched on the edge of the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the Liberal Party platform had promised a radical restructuring of the Canadian energy sector which would surely cause domestic disruption. Nevertheless, Trudeau signalled immediately that he would embark on an ambitious international agenda, one that would concentrate on the gap between rich and poor—and the urgent need to close it.8

  Even before his election loss in 1979, Trudeau had committed himself to a new direction. In the G7 meetings of 1977 and 1978, with the strong support of Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter, he had vigorously urged consideration of the interests of developing countries. When Carter first met Trudeau in 1977, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the president’s national security adviser, urged him to “recognize Canada’s special access and credibility among third world countries, particularly the poorest, and bear in mind that Canadian policy toward China and Cuba has evolved more rapidly than ours.” In his reply to Carter’s toast on that February 1977 visit, Trudeau thanked the president for his comments about Canada and the “Third World” and pointed out that Canada had become one of the “top four or five nations” giving assistance to developing countries, even though, he concluded, “we in Canada today tend to be a little bit cynical toward the role of Canada in the world and toward its generosity.” The “modest” Canada minding its own knitting, which Trudeau had evoked in the late sixties, was becoming outdated.9

  Canadian money followed where Trudeau’s speeches pointed: Canadian development assistance rose after 1974, and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) was reorganized and expanded. By 1980, when Trudeau returned to office, his determination to advance the development agenda was met with skepticism by a new member of the G7 club, Margaret Thatcher, who had become prime minister of Britain in May that year. Formidable, opinionated, wedded to market economics, and suspicious of the Soviet Union and of socialists generally, the “Iron Lady” reacted strongly to the report on North-South differences issued by a commission chaired by Willy Brandt, the Social Democrat former German chancellor: “The whole concept of ‘North-South’ dialogue, which the Brandt Commission had made the fashionable talk of the international community, was in my view wrong-headed,” she later wrote. And she had little use for the multiracial Commonwealth either, which she regarded as “another conspiracy of the unscrupulous and the profligate, given to idealistic schemes which had to be tempered by a dose of British realism.”10 Never one to conceal her opinions, Thatcher let Trudeau know quickly that she thought poorly of the proposal by the Mexicans, strongly supported by Canada, that a summit on the North-South divide take place in Mexico to discuss urgent topics such as technology transfer, energy, and food reserves. Trudeau and Ivan Head, now the president of the International Development Research Centre but still close to Trudeau, were already enthusiastic proponents of Mexico’s plan. And with Canada due to chair the G7 in 1981, Trudeau used his convening power to place development at the centre of the agenda for the summit and to set the stage for the Mexican event at Cancún later that year.11

  Before the G7 summit convened at the Quebec resort of Château Montebello in July 1981, Thatcher found a sympathetic companion when Ronald Reagan soundly defeated Jimmy Carter in the U.S. election of November 1980. This Anglo-American conservative romance provoked Trudeau’s strong contrarian spirit and stirred him occasionally to tweak the beak of the American eagle; to resist ever more strongly the conservative tides that were sweeping through the Canadian media, economics departments, think tanks, Bay Street, and some government departments; and to become a countervailing force against the strong currents looking to limit the role of the state. Because of his determination to advance his development agenda and his concern about Reagan’s and Thatcher’s impact on both international affairs and Canadian domestic politics, Trudeau regularly eclipsed Mark MacGuigan, the external affairs minister, and placed himself at the centre of Canada’s international activities. MacGuigan, who had served without Cabinet position since 1968, quietly resented Trudeau’s interventions and grimly endured his secondary status.12

  In some respects, MacGuigan fit the times better than Trudeau. Carter, with whom Trudeau had established fine personal relations, gave up on détente soon after the Liberal government fell in December 1979, particularly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day and the Cold War began anew. “Détente,” historian John Gaddis writes, “had failed … to halt the nuclear arms race, or to end superpower rivalries in the ‘third world,’ or even to prevent the Soviet Union from using military force again to save ‘socialism.’” In January 1980 an angry and humiliated Carter withdrew the SALT II treaty from the American Senate, placed sanctions on the Soviet Union, and announced an increase in defence spending, which he, Ford, and Nixon had cut by almost half during the years of détente.13 MacGuigan, who was deeply suspicious of Soviet communism, was not surprised, but Trudeau was very disappointed in Carter’s actions. Under the tutelage of his friend Helmut Schmidt, Trudeau in the late 1970s had embraced NATO as an instrument of détente: he decided that Canadian forces should remain in Europe, that defence spending should rise, that the armed forces should receive new equipment (notably Leopard tanks bought from West Germany in 1976), and that NATO should continue its commitment to détente even as the Soviet arsenal grew rapidly throughout the seventies.14 Together, Trudeau and Schmidt disputed Thatcher’s caustic dismissal of Third World interests and regarded the assertive Anglo-American celebration of the free market as dangerous.15

  When Trudeau returned to office for his fourth, unexpected term, he determined to focus his attention on two issues of special importance to him, which he had left unfinished in 1979: the patriation of the Constitution at home and, abroad, the divide between North and South. Both the left and the burgeoning nongovernmental agencies were denouncing Canada for its failure to achieve the 0.7 percent of Canadian GDP he had promised for international aid in the 1968 election campaign. Indeed, tough economic times had reduced the percentage to 0.47 percent of GDP in 1979–80, from a high of 0.53 percent in 1975–76. Aid advocates also complained that Canada clung to punitive tariffs against developing nations’ products, subsidized agriculture in a manner that undermined poor countries, and tied too much of its assistance to the purchase of Canadian materials and services.16

  The North-South Institute, an Ottawa-based think tank created in 1976, assessed Trudeau’s legacy in a “report card” issued in 1980 and gave him failing marks on nine out of twenty-one commitments, “unsatisfactory” marks on four, “good” on two, and “excellent” on only one.17 The young and often strident “new political economy” groups in Canadian universities also castigated the government’s record: they used the fashionable dependency theories of inter national economic development to challenge free-market theorists, as Trudeau did, but also employed Marxist analysis to explain the economic weakness of the South, as Trudeau did not. He therefore became a familiar target for his “hypocrisy,” and many condemned his energetic advocacy of development issues in international gatherings as no more than opportunism and cheap politics. Trudeau responded with disdain for his critics and for the Canadian public’s seeming indifference to the issue, as he initiated a flurry of activity designed to restore North-South issues to the forefront of the international agenda. MacGuigan later recalled that in dealing with these issues, T
rudeau “was filled with youthful vigour and idealism” and, in 1981, was “totally consumed” by the North-South agenda. A critical Margaret Thatcher shared MacGuigan’s opinion.18

  Despite opposition from the Anglo-American conservatives abroad and criticism at home, Trudeau believed that circumstances now gave him some advantages—particularly in the several international conferences scheduled for 1981. First came the G7 summit at Montebello in July, followed by the International Meeting on Cooperation and Development in the Mexican resort city of Cancún in October. All along he had supported the Brandt Commission’s call for an international summit to advance “global negotiations,” and now it took concrete political form as Mexican president José López Portillo and Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky organized the Cancún meeting. As host of the earlier G7 summit, he knew he would have the opportunity to try to steer the West’s major leaders to support the goals of this second get-together. The third international gathering was the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, scheduled for September 20 to October 7 in Australia, where Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser shared Trudeau’s North-South concerns and where the large majority from developing states would be certain to isolate Thatcher and Reagan’s hostility to international economic reform. Perhaps there was a chance.