Just Watch Me

by John English

  As he drove to Heathrow Airport with Jamieson after the meeting, Trudeau’s mood changed abruptly from celebration of the past and reflection on the troubled international present to concern about the future of the Liberal Party after the leadership convention in Ottawa the following weekend. Some months before, he and Jamieson had talked at the high commissioner’s residence in London about the next election. Jamieson, a shrewd political analyst, thought the polls were bad and that Trudeau should step down lest he suffer a disastrous defeat. Trudeau, instinctively the contrarian, responded: “Politics is still fun. I enjoy what I’m doing and can’t think of anything I want to do more.” Now, as the limousine neared Heathrow’s VIP compound and officials gathered to escort Trudeau for the last time as Canada’s prime minister, Jamieson realized that his companion truly was not “happy about calling it a day.” He liked his job and took great pride in it, and resignation was inevitably a loss for a man who hated to lose. Years later his son Alexandre said that part of his father had died that February night in Ottawa, when he walked through the blizzard and discovered no signs of destiny, nothing but driving snow. Never again would he find so fully the challenges he craved and the energy to face them.2

  Perhaps Trudeau had stayed in power too long. Unlike King, St. Laurent, and Pearson, who guided the choice of their successors, he stood at the sidelines as the next leader emerged. Within hours of his resignation, it was clear that John Turner was now ready to leave Bay Street and would almost certainly win the leadership. The Toronto stock market soared when the news broke at 12:30 p.m. on February 29 that Trudeau was going, and wild applause greeted the announcement at a gathering of oil men in Calgary. Margaret Thatcher was respectful, if a bit oblique, in her remarks, stating that “none of us who worked with the Prime Minister over the years ever had reason to question his commitment to his personal vision for Canada or the ideals he held with such tenacity.” Meanwhile, the American government issued a reserved statement in which it wished Trudeau well in his “future endeavors.” But an assistant for Republican senator Jesse Helms revealed a wider disregard when he asked, “What country is that?” after he heard of Trudeau’s departure.

  The provincial premiers also varied widely in their response. Alberta’s Peter Lougheed, whom Trudeau had grown to admire, was typically generous and offered “sincere appreciation” for Trudeau’s “long career in the public service of the country.” Bill Bennett, the Social Credit premier of British Columbia, said only that he would leave it to “historians to measure Mr. Trudeau’s stewardship,” while Sterling Lyon, the former Conservative premier of Manitoba, freely gave his assessment: Trudeau had been “an absolute disaster.” René Lévesque, who was still premier in Quebec, largely agreed with Lyon but tempered his criticism with the words that “in some ways,” he was sorry to see him go. Trudeau’s vision of a bilingual Canada was unrealistic, but he grudgingly allowed that it was a “potentially generous” dream.3

  On the long flight home from London, Trudeau surely must have thought about the events of the next few days, when he would hand the leadership to Turner and receive a tribute at the convention. Two decades earlier, he had embraced the Liberal Party only hesitantly, but in the years since, he had stirred its heart and troubled its soul while leading it to four election victories and almost fifteen years of power. His inquisitive mind, trained in the Brébeuf classrooms decades before to present both sides of an argument effectively, pondered what that long tenure had meant for him, for Quebec, and for Canada. Quebec remained within Canada, its citizens’ rights embodied within a charter, and both francophones and anglophones could, for the first time, work in and with the national government in either French or English. Canada had become a different country because of his years as prime minister. Yet the federal government was more distant from Canadians than it had been before, new fissures had opened within the Canadian confederation, and the nation’s mood was churlish—very different from that unforgettable summer of 1968, when he, as the Liberals’ new leader, made his historic electoral progress across the land into a shining moment of Trudeaumania. And he would be returning home to Montreal, where he would find much hostility in his old haunts of university common rooms and intellectual soirées. Wistful he no doubt was as he thought of what he had done—and, perhaps even more, of what he might have done.

  As he remembered things past, he likely turned, as he always had, to what mattered right now. He clung to the remaining fragments of his peace initiative and took heart from Reagan’s unexpected declaration that Moscow and Washington must begin to negotiate to end the nuclear standoff. Margot Kidder, the close friend who became his stern critic after he allowed cruise missile testing in Canada’s North, had enthusiastically cheered his pilgrimage for peace. Together they shared a new sense of accomplishment when she came to 24 Sussex for the last time on May 4, and later sent him a postcard saying, “And woman’s best friend is man (don’t tell the feminists I said that).” Among the thousands of letters he received after February 29, many mentioned his last months when he travelled the world for peace. The image lingered as Liberals gathered in Ottawa on June 15, 1984, for their leadership convention, and a few days previously, the respected political writers Sandra and Richard Gwyn had published a surprisingly favourable assessment in “The Politics of Peace.” “It roused Canadians and marked Canada’s re-entry into the world,” they claimed. Geoffrey Pearson, who like his colleagues in the Department of External Affairs had long been critical of Trudeau’s idiosyncratic approach to diplomacy, wrote a private letter to the departing prime minister in which he praised the peace initiative: it created a better international climate, he said, and galvanized “the good will of the Canadian people.”4

  Just before the Liberal convention, however, External Affairs ungraciously published critical accounts in its journal, International Perspectives, one on Trudeau’s peace initiative and the other on his foreign policy generally. Fortunately, only a handful of the thousands of Liberals and hundreds of journalists who gathered at Ottawa’s Civic Centre had read it.5 The leadership race had become more interesting than anyone had expected, as John Turner stumbled at the starting gate. Although a group had formed in Toronto to plan his campaign in 1983, little had been accomplished because Turner did not want to appear to be grasping at power. One of his anxious young supporters, lawyer Alf Apps, told the press that he had supported Turner because he would “clean house” in Ottawa. He complained that he and his group knew Trudeau was “going to resign and all January and February we were trying to get out and organize, but couldn’t get the go-ahead. It was like being in a pressure cooker with the lid about to blow off.” Turner quickly attracted some of Trudeau’s strongest allies in Cabinet to his side and, very cleverly, made the left-leaning Lloyd Axworthy his honorary campaign chair. Still, his Bay Street base positioned him as the conservative candidate—and, implicitly, the opponent of Trudeau’s legacy.

  The shrewd and popular Jean Chrétien initially believed that because Turner’s support was exceptionally strong, he should not contest the race. However, when he heard Turner distancing himself from Trudeau in his March 16 press conference, he decided he would throw his hat into the ring, and he quickly emerged as the populist and progressive candidate who reflected the Trudeau tradition. “Turner,” he later claimed, “wanted to create three fundamental impressions. One, that he had nothing to do with Trudeau. Two, that he was to bring the Liberal Party to the right, closer to the business community. Three, that he was to be soft on the language issue in order to attract votes in the West.” As the convention neared, he daily gained strength even as Turner became the object of sharp media attack. Through it all, Trudeau remained silent and increasingly grumpy, but he was preparing to steal the show.6

  In “cleaning house,” Turner was expected to toss out, in Apps’s words, the “Coutts, Davey, Axworthy, Goldfarb crowd,” which many of his supporters, with some justice, blamed for the leftist tilt of the party in recent years. But Trudeau’
s crowd still controlled the present, if not the future. Davey wrote to Ottawa’s favourite son Paul Anka on April 2, telling him that he had “always believed that ‘My Way’ is the greatest exit song of all time. Indeed,” he continued, “your words appropriately describe our Prime Minister.” Davey told Anka that with the help of his “friend and classmate” director Norman Jewison, he had arranged for the first evening of the convention to be a tribute to Trudeau. Earlier, newspaper baron I.H. “Izzy” Asper had agreed with Davey that “My Way” was the ideal theme song, but he warned, as he envisioned the scene, “You are going to have a big orchestra because it must go off with a blast and be repeated several times because there will be a long-standing, cheering ovation, and the music has to go all through that part.” It should be Trudeau’s “exit music, with all the house lights down and a single white spot light on him as he walks out alone, preferably with the three boys, with a single wave to the audience when he reaches the exit curtain.” He strongly urged Davey to “have a young man from Ottawa [Anka] sing the song he wrote … with a portable mike … with a single spot light on him singing it, ending it when he reaches the Prime Minister, where he hands him the autographed original manuscript for the song.”7

  Davey, an American pop culture addict, also tried to persuade Barbra Streisand to attend, offering a private plane to whisk her in and out, but her son’s graduation created an impossible conflict. Nevertheless, she did send best wishes to be broadcast across Canada. Anka accepted the invitation to sing in tribute to Trudeau, and he asked Davey how he could “personalize” the song for the occasion. Davey emphasized the peace initiative, the National Energy Program (“the Canadianization of the Oil Industry”), the referendum, the four election victories, and Trudeau’s “remarkable style and intellect.”8 And the charisma held: when Trudeau arrived at the convention to pick up his credentials package at 9 a.m. on the Thursday morning, an “uncontrollable mob scene” ensued: the media knocked over tables to get near the departing prime minister, and delegates thrust their programs before a bemused Trudeau, who willingly autographed them.9 It seemed like Trudeaumania all over again—except that the key player would receive his old age pension the following year.

  The sun was still shining when the tribute began in the early evening of June 14. Surrounded by family and friends, Trudeau took his central spot for the spectacle, entitled “Pierre Elliott Trudeau: We Were There.” First, there was a twenty-minute film, produced entirely without comment but with many images, including video clips and photographs, and documenting Trudeau’s life as the anthems of the age played in the background: “Every Breath You Take” from The Police, “I’ll Take You There” from the Staple Singers, and many more. It was, cultural critic Ian Brown wrote, a “political rock video” that its creators privately dubbed “Trudeau’s Last Supper.” The tributes were warm, generous, often amusing, and brimming with hyperbole. Trudeau wept openly. Finally, he took the stage at 9:07 in the darkened arena, without notes and with the spotlights only on him. As always, he began softly, talking about values, Liberalism, philosopher John Locke, and, inevitably, the historian Lord Acton. The Canada he had discovered in 1968 was an adolescent country, Trudeau said, but during his time it had reached a “certain maturity.”

  Then, suddenly, he became the gunslinger, his fingers in his belt loop, defiant in his gaze, spitting out his words as he attacked those who had tried to stare him down: “And I have found that in any of the reforms, the difficult reforms that we have tried to bring in my years, whenever the going was tough and we were opposed by the multinationals or by the provincial premiers or by the superpowers, I realized that if our cause was right, all we had to do to win was to talk over the heads of the premiers, over the heads of the multinationals, over the heads of the superpowers to the people of this country, to the people of Canada.” That was how “we” had won the referendum, brought home the Constitution, and given Canadians the “people’s package.”10 Trudeau had reached the final curtain but, he declared: “Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die.”

  Then, as Davey and Asper had scripted, Anka began to sing “His Way.” Of one thing Canadians were certain, through all those fifteen years Trudeau had done things his way. As the crowd cheered ever louder, many were crying and others joined in the music until the end. At that point, Justin, Sacha, and Michel emerged on the stage with “Trudeau” inscribed on their caps, their love for their father abounding, even if they did not understand what he meant when he said: “I want my kids to see that the line of business their dad was in had some importance in the country.”11

  The applause had been deafening when Trudeau described how he had stood up to the Goliaths in Washington, yet the evening throbbed with the vitality of American political and pop culture—from Streisand’s breathless words to Anka’s celebration, first written for Frank Sinatra: “old blue eyes, the chairman of the board, the leader of the pack.” Preceded by comedian Rich Little’s mocking imitations of Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Trudeau’s speech eerily echoed Ted Kennedy’s farewell on behalf of his fabled family after he gave up the fight for the Democratic nomination in 1980—a tribute to Trudeau’s memory and his desire to link himself with the progressive path from which he had often deviated but to which he adamantly returned during his last months in office. There, he had been joined not only by Margot Kidder but also by peace activist June Callwood and nationalist hero Walter Gordon, Pearson’s political mentor, who had denounced Trudeau in 1972 because he had failed to challenge the Americans and their Canadian collaborators on almost all issues of concern to them. Trudeau’s way had become their way once again.12

  But it was not the way of most Canadians, who had begun to follow the Americans in their shift to the right.* The next day, Turner, in his speech at the convention, avoided the past while pointing to a future with a more responsible economic policy, less conflict with the provinces, and accommodation toward those who had stood outside the Liberal Party during the Trudeau years. About Trudeau, he said only that he was the “most remarkable Canadian of his generation”—a remark that produced thunderous applause and general agreement, even from Trudeau’s critics. On Saturday night, when Turner won on the second ballot, Liberal Party president Iona Campagnolo declared him first in the vote, with Chrétien first in their hearts. Trudeau joined Turner on the stage but said nothing.

  When the celebrations ended, Trudeau told the staff at the National Archives in Ottawa that he would begin working on his papers once he was bored. In London he had told reporters that he had no plans for the future apart from being with “the boys.” He met with Turner after the victory, requested that some of his favourite colleagues receive positions, and agreed to leave office on June 30. Before he drove away from Sussex Drive in his Mercedes 300SL, he made numerous patronage appointments. Turner announced seventeen others on July 9, when, urged on by caucus hawks and encouraged by polls, he called an election. The new prime minister explained that the appointment of these Liberal MPs to the bench, the diplomatic service, and other agencies had been delayed because he needed to maintain a majority in the House. But the excuse was not convincing. Although Trudeau remained largely absent from the actual campaign, canvassing for only a few old allies, this rash of appointments became a central election issue. In Canada’s most decisive televised political debate, Brian Mulroney suddenly turned and lashed out at Turner about them:

  “I had no option,” Turner replied defiantly.

  “You had an option, sir,” Mulroney immediately countered. “You could have said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’”

  On the way home from the studio, Mila Mulroney told her husband, “The earth just moved.”

  Conservative pollster Allan Gregg told the Tory team that Canadians disliked the Liberals but liked their liberal policies. “These findings,” wrote Clarkson and McCall, “persuaded Mulroney to work hard at assuring Canadians that
his government would not undermine Pierre Trudeau’s legacy and [would] come out four-square for universal social programs, bilingualism in Manitoba, and peace in our time.” Privately in Washington, however, he criticized Trudeau to Canadian ambassador Allan Gotlieb, who, fed up with the former prime minister himself, welcomed Mulroney to his embassy in late June. But during the campaign, Mulroney was careful “never to knock Trudeau in public, only Turner.” And Trudeau kept silent, although he suggested that Mulroney was preferable to Clark because he spoke directly to the people. On September 4 Mulroney won an astonishing 211 seats and the Liberals only 40. In Quebec, where they had won 74 seats in 1980 with Trudeau, they now had 17. 13

  Trudeau moved into his Montreal home, the art deco masterpiece that was, as Margaret had warned, scarcely suitable for raising three rambunctious children under the age of fourteen, with its marble floors, multiple levels, and original Cormier furniture. Gone, too, were the drivers, nannies, and cooks who had eased life at Sussex Drive.14 But he managed well. That summer he promised the boys that they would see the places he had visited when he was young, and they were thrilled to know that over the following years they would visit the Soviet Union (where family friend Alexander Yakovlev was making a considerable mark on the reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev), China (where the Communist regime seemed to be opening and was perhaps unravelling), Britain (where Trudeau had studied with the great socialist Harold Laski so long ago), and of course Paris (where he showed them a little hotel near Notre Dame where he had lived and debated about God, love, and poetry long into the night).15

  And there were honours, too. Just after Trudeau retired, the Queen awarded the former rebel against the Crown the Order of the Companions of Honour, which never expanded beyond sixty-five living members, chosen for their exceptional service. And in November he accepted a peace prize from the Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation in Washington. Invitations flooded the mailbox at Trudeau’s Avenue des Pins home in Montreal, tourists gawked from their buses, and motorists slowed as they passed. The RCMP offered security personnel to watch the house, and he surprised RCMP Commissioner Robert Simmonds when he asked whether he should consider carrying a pistol. Soon after he left politics, he accepted the position of senior counsel at Heenan Blaikie, an enterprising, smaller law firm founded by his former personal lawyer and, later, Liberal Cabinet member Don Johnston, the eminent labour lawyer Roy Heenan, and the prominent Conservative Peter Blaikie. When he spoke to Jim Coutts about the position, Coutts suggested that he could bargain for a high salary. Trudeau replied, “But I can walk to work.” And he did just that on most working days when he was in Montreal, sometimes wearing a beret but inevitably dapper and noticed. Taunts were rare, respectful nods many. Trudeau had come home.16