Just Watch Me
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Trudeau shrugged off such attacks. The blame rested, he claimed, with those “unscrupulous politicians” who, like Mulroney, gave in to blackmail: “French Canadians will be rid of this kind of politician if the blackmail ceases, and the blackmail will cease only if Canada refuses to dance to that tune. Impartial history has shown that it was exactly this attitude that pushed separatism to the brink of the grave between 1980 and 1984.” Mulroney, Bourassa, and, later, Peterson and others, he claimed, had raised separatism from the grave and, in the process, threatened to destroy Canada. It is fair to ask: Was Trudeau’s bitter opposition to the Meech and Charlottetown accords driven by personal resentment at being excluded by his successors, by principled opposition to constitutional change, or by a desire to return to the battlefields where he had found past glory? Probably each element played its part, though his closest colleagues and his family members all testify to the fierce passion both these accords aroused in him. Gérard Pelletier confessed to others that Trudeau’s ferocity surprised him. For Trudeau, however, that intensity was essential if he was to make the point against a deadening consensus—just as it had been years earlier against Maurice Duplessis in Catholic Quebec. Now, going into a fourth decade, Trudeau deeply affected Canada and Canadians. Charlottetown was his final public performance; it provoked, angered, inspired, and ultimately convinced many. But some old friends, including Gordon Robertson, Bob Rae, and his former speechwriter André Burelle, left his circle with bitter feelings.26
“He haunts us still,” the memorable opening sentence of Clarkson and McCall’s biography published in 1990, proved the point as, over the following four years, Trudeau’s memoirs and an accompanying television “mini-series” became wildly popular. Even a collection of dense essays on “the just society,” with Trudeau merely as co-editor, had perched on the top of bestseller lists for weeks. His publisher and his colleague Ivan Head persuaded him to write a history of his international work, entitled The Canadian Way, which was in part a response to Granatstein and Bothwell’s Pirouette, an analysis of foreign policy under Trudeau, and in part a sustained attack on the Department of External Affairs, which, Trudeau and Head believed, had too often undermined their initiatives.
The Memoirs were disappointing. They showed signs of haste and, more surprisingly, demonstrated surprisingly little reflection about his life and accomplishments. Former press secretary Dick O’Hagan had urged Trudeau to write memoirs many times, and he now believes that Trudeau was unwilling to confront his own past, his early nationalism and flirtation with separatism, his private fears, and the contradictions in his views. Many argue that the handsome royalties Trudeau received for the book and the tele vision series provoked him to write and to appear on screen, but the deadlines produced a lightweight product where style trumped substance. As someone who has pored over the early writings of Trudeau, I would add that Trudeau always had difficulty in writing sustained prose. He fussed over every word, changed commas constantly, and revised endlessly. Whatever the deficiency of his memoirs and later appearances, they clearly demonstrate that he was enormously proud of his accomplishments: his polemics against Meech, Mulroney, Charlottetown, Bourassa, and Bouchard all reveal his profound sense of having created a legacy. When Jack Granatstein finally managed to get an interview with Trudeau—in exchange for lunch at Montreal’s famed Ritz-Carlton—Trudeau turned on him at the end of dessert. “Why did you say I had corrupted the bureaucracy with patronage appointments?” he asked. Baffled, his host claimed ignorance, but Trudeau immediately of The Ottawa Men, where Granatstein had questioned the recent “politicization” of the civil service. Trudeau had vowed to live in the present, look to the future, and shake off history’s cobwebs; but in the nineties the evidence suggests that his legacy mattered greatly to him.27
The past mattered ever more as old friends disappeared. François Hertel (the nom de plume for Rudolph Dubé), long ago his nationalist mentor and principal confidant, died in 1985. Three years later it was Jean Marchand, whose relationship with Trudeau had survived much buffeting in the seventies. In 1992 Trudeau dedicated Towards a Just Society to Marchand: “He died before being able to contribute to the present volume; but the history written here would not have happened, had it not been for the extraordinary man of action that was Jean Marchand.” Trudeau himself seemed to cling to the young, and he became closer than ever before to Senator Jacques Hébert, who gained national attention (and a visit from Trudeau) in 1986 when he fasted in the antechamber of the Senate to force the Mulroney government to restore funding to Katimavik, a youth program he had founded with Trudeau’s encouragement. Pierre also focused ever more intensely on his sons. Writer Bruce Powe, who met him frequently for lunch during his retirement and wrote a thoughtful book about those meetings, told how Trudeau recalled those times when the boys were “around ten, eleven, thirteen” and he would read to them—Rousseau, poetry, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and many others. Those times were “one of the happiest periods of my life,” he mused. But boys grow up, brief moments of their past together remain as memory, and sadness often abides. Perhaps that was one source of Trudeau’s intermittent anger in these years.28
Once, in the early nineties, the boys got a call to come home for an urgent family meeting. Trudeau had news: he was becoming a father again. He had worked closely with constitutional lawyer Deborah Coyne after she became the adviser on the Meech Lake Accord to Premier Clyde Wells. She and Trudeau had a child together, Sarah Elisabeth Coyne, whose birth was registered on May 5, 1991, at St. John’s, with Trudeau listed as the father. The news soon spread, first to the scandal magazine Frank and then to the national press on September 6. Both Coyne and Trudeau refused to comment. Trudeau’s age, seventy-one, attracted particular attention in the cartoons and media reports, and it weighed on him when he met with his sons. So once again he strode over the boundaries of the generations between them and, that night, read to them from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s magnificent “Ulysses,” with the hero on his final voyage, still searching for new experience as he struggles against the tightening bindings of time:
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
… Come, my friend,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
…
Tho‘much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Striving, seeking, still finding, Trudeau began his last decade with a new life to share.29
Justin was now studying at McGill University, just down the street from Trudeau’s home. Sacha was finishing at Brébeuf, where he vigorously debated his fellow students about Quebec and Canada, and his father in the evenings about democracy and anarchism—to which he was increasingly attracted. Trudeau, ever the questioner, responded with a vigorous defence of democracy and the free market and, more effectively, urged Sacha to read Dostoevsky, where he learned about the moral greyness of anarchism. And Michel, who seemed a blend of his two brothers, was also at Brébeuf, enduring the slings of the separatists as his father battled once again in the dirtiest trenches.
In 1993, when the Liberals returned to power, Trudeau praised Jean Chrétien unreservedly in his memoirs—something he had not always done. He charged “that those Quebecers who denigrate the man and his style do so because they don’t like what he is saying in defence of Canada.” The volume appeared just before Chrétien became prime minister, but Trudeau’s influence weighed surp
risingly lightly on the new government. The official Opposition was now the Bloc Québécois under its leader Lucien Bouchard, and the third party was the Reform Party—a strong voice of western Canadian alienation. Both parties virulently attacked the results of Trudeau’s years in power, and Chrétien’s government responded by moving away from past wars—not only Meech and Charlottetown but also the economic policies of the seventies and eighties, which had produced a large, debilitating public debt. Chrétien told his caucus that never again must the party be smeared as the “tax and spend” Liberals. Trudeau’s legacy remained in the shades.30
In September 1994 Jacques Parizeau became premier of Quebec. A decade earlier he had stepped away from the Parti Québécois when Lévesque and his successor, Pierre-Marc Johnson, moved toward conciliation with the rest of Canada. In his campaign, Parizeau had unambiguously promised a referendum on separation within a year—a sensible move, given the simmering animosity in Quebec against the recent failures of Meech and Charlottetown and the success of Bouchard in the federal election. True to his word, Parizeau called a referendum for October 30, 1995. Initially, the polls favoured the federalists, but then they suddenly swung toward the sovereignists. The non side rallied its forces, and in a huge wave of emotion, premiers, politicians, and ordinary citizens from all parts of Canada descended on Montreal on October 27, where they staged a “unity rally” with over one hundred thousand people crowded into the streets. But no one called on Trudeau to make a speech on Canadian unity—his “magnificent obsession”—or even to join the current leaders on the stage. Alone and rejected, the once fiery orator watched the massive rally in the square below from his office window at Heenan Blaikie’s office, perched high above Avenue René Lévesque, where anti-separatists gathered for the rally. That evening Canadians learned that the referendum result was dangerously close—50.58 percent voted no; 49.42 percent, yes.
This near disaster was too much for Trudeau. He turned away from public life, telling Bruce Powe that his dearest hope now was that his children would remember him. He visited Sarah regularly in Toronto, where Deborah Coyne was now living, taking her to the swings in the local park and sometimes on short trips.* He still travelled, and even took on the rapids during canoe trips, but time and fate had finally made him weaker. He began to notice that his extraordinary memory was failing. “What is this thing?” he asked an old friend as he pointed at the bread basket before him. He attended a Toronto celebration of the launch of a new Cité libre in January 1998, and when asked why he did not speak, he said openly: “I have no memory.” One of those present, Catherine Annau, who made the notable film Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the Seventies Generation, recalls the evening when, in her words, the room held “a veritable Who’s Who of the English-Canadian cultural and intellectual establishment—of about thirty years ago.” She joined the long receiving line, but her “exchange with the Great Man was for all intents and purposes banal.” He seemed shrunken and old, but then, as he shook her hand, “a slight smile crossed his lips and a distant twinkle” appeared in his eyes. Some instincts are never forgotten.31
His sadness had deepened when Gérard Pelletier died of cancer on June 22, 1997; Trudeau was now the last of the three wise men who had fought Duplessis together at Asbestos, joined ranks to remake Ottawa in the sixties, and battled against separatism in the decades that followed. Pelletier was, he told those gathered at the funeral, “My guide and my mentor…. It is a part of my soul that has just departed and that will be waiting for me.”32
But worse came on the afternoon of November 13, 1998, when his beloved youngest son, Michel, was swept by an avalanche into a lake in British Columbia’s Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park, where he was skiing with friends. He struggled briefly to free himself from his gear, they reported, before sinking forever into the lake’s depths. A week later an ashen old man held by his two surviving sons, with his stricken former wife beside him, mourned Michel in Saint-Viateur in Outremont, the church where he had prayed since childhood. For a time he prayed no more, torn by doubts about a God who would take Michel and leave the wretched body that held his weary soul. He struggled with his faith, talked to his priests, began to believe once more, and finally took refuge once again in the consolation of his faith and its Church.33
Then cancer began to spread from his prostate gland through his body, while the Parkinson’s disease he had developed a few years earlier advanced and rendered his once mobile face an expressionless mask. He knew the time left to him was fleeting. He began to say goodbye to those who mattered most to him, often at lunch, where he talked about times past, memories shared, and deeds done. Generally, he was reclusive, though he enjoyed visiting writer Nancy Southam in her converted fire hall nearby, where interesting people, including poet-muse Leonard Cohen, often dropped by. Cohen sketched him one day and wrote a short poem about Pierre, whom he admired enormously. On April 6, 1998, Maclean’s ran a story on “Trudeau, 30 Years Later.” His impact on Canada was acknowledged to be enormous, although his influence on the current Liberal government in Ottawa was correctly said to be limited. Acquaintances reported that he rarely had visitors to his home, no longer liked to drive, spoke more slowly, and wore clothes that were somewhat tattered. “Incredibly,” one acquaintance said, “he seems … to be mellowing.” When former Bourassa Cabinet minister William Tetley asked to see him to discuss a book he was writing about the October Crisis, they went to lunch on August 29, 1999, at a Chinese restaurant. He began by talking about Michel and his interest in the environment. However, as Tetley read his own diary entries, Trudeau filled in details, his long-term memory still surprisingly sharp, his anger still palpable. But, Tetley said, he was “never bitter, nor mean or noisy, but very fair, reasonable, quiet and calm.” He said that, after lunch, he would walk home up the 102 stairs of the Avenue du Musée. Perhaps he did, but not for much longer.34
In 1999 the Canadian Press named Trudeau the “newsmaker of the century.”* He refused an interview but wrote a letter saying that he was “at once surprised and quite pleased with the information.” Then, in the late summer of 2000, rumours swept the country that Trudeau was gravely ill. People clustered more than they normally did outside the Maison Cormier, now forever Trudeau’s home. Margaret was at his side once more, with Sacha and Justin, when he died on September 28, 2000. Pollster Michael Adams had warned that Canadians were not prepared for the death of Pierre Trudeau and, emotionally, it came as a shock. Peter Mansbridge interrupted the CBC coverage of the Summer Olympics to announce Trudeau’s death, and the games vanished as Canadian evening television filled with images of Trudeau. John Ralston Saul would later write that we all think we know him, but “much of that myth of knowing has to do with how we see ourselves through the mirror of his long years of power.”
For most Canadians, Trudeau is forever linked with remaking a country where anglophone prime ministers spoke no French, where public servants could not serve a quarter of the population in their own language, where politicians could not break from constitutional links with Britain, where courts shied away from activism, where foreign leaders were not challenged, where there were no separatists in the House of Commons, and where great existential challenges of the nation’s future had not been faced for over a century. Others, such as the lawyer Guy Pratte, argued that his vision was outmoded, his approach damaging, and his legacy corrupted. He was, Pratte wrote in 1998, a “failure as a leader.” Comparing Trudeau with Lincoln, Pratte asserted that Trudeau lacked Lincoln’s pragmatism, generosity of outlook, and willingness to compromise. But history changes focus: for the first eighty years after Lincoln’s death, historians chipped away at Lincoln’s leadership, excoriated the way his generals laid waste the South, and surrounded their stories with the spirit of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Only when the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court finally gave meaning to equal rights did the clouds reveal Lincoln in his pristine greatness. Trudeau’s death removed some of the mists from the mirror, but
later Canadians will see his stature even more clearly.35