Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read online

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau

  ALSO IN THE

  EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS

  SERIES:

  Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe

  Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards

  Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson

  Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto

  Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam

  Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell

  Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin

  by John Ralston Saul

  Wilfrid Laurier by André Pratte

  Stephen Leacock by Margaret MacMillan

  René Lévesque by Daniel Poliquin

  Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray

  Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland

  L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart

  Lester B. Pearson by Andrew Cohen

  Mordecai Richler by M.G. Vassanji

  Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden

  SERIES EDITOR:

  John Ralston Saul

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau

  by NINO RICCI

  With an Introduction by

  John Ralston Saul

  SERIES EDITOR

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Nino Ricci, 2009

  Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2009

  Direct quotes from the Trudeau Papers that are excerpted from Citizen of the World: The Life

  of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Volume One: 1919–1968 by John English are reprinted here

  by kind permission of the Author, and of Knopf Canada. Copyright in all letters and papers

  by Pierre Elliott Trudeau: © Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

  Translation of quotes from the Trudeau papers that were originally written in French are

  reprinted here by permission of John English: translation copyright © 2006 John English.

  Excerpts from Memoirs by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.,

  are used with permission of the publisher. © 1993 Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner

  and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Ricci, Nino, 1959–

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau / Nino Ricci.

  (Extraordinary Canadians)

  ISBN 978-0-670-06660-5

  1. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 1919–2000. 2. Canada—Politics

  and government—1968–1979. 3. Canada—Politics and

  government—1980–1984. 4. Prime ministers—Canada—Biography.

  I. Title. II. Series: Extraordinary Canadians

  FC626.T7R52 2009 971.064’4092 C2009-900461-5

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  This book was printed on 30% PCW recycled paper

  For my teachers

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by John Ralston Saul

  1 The Hero with a Thousand Faces

  2 1968 and All That

  3 Against the Current

  4 Cité libre

  5 Just Watch Me

  6 In the Bedrooms of the Nation

  7 Notwithstanding

  8 He Haunts Us Still

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHRONOLOGY

  INTRODUCTION BY

  John Ralston Saul

  How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.

  This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?

  For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.

  These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.

  All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.

  Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.

  You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook wa
s one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.

  The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.

  That is why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.

  The one continuous, essential voice of biography since 1961 has been the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. But there has not been a project of book-length biographies such as Extraordinary Canadians in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons. As history rolls on, some truths remain the same while others are revealed in a new and unexpected way.

  What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in these people’s lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of them, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.

  Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau is one of the most difficult modern figures to write about. All of us think we know him. And much of that myth of knowing has to do with how we see ourselves through the mirror of his long years of power. But knowing isn’t understanding. Nino Ricci’s novels have shown his great talent for revealing the complexities of the human heart. Here he has created a portrait, both psychological and intellectual, that puts together what we know with what we try to understand about Trudeau and ourselves. The strengths and weaknesses of the leader, his victories and failures, become one with the ambitions of the citizenry in an era when to be ambitious for your country—or against it—was considered the norm.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hero with a Thousand Faces

  In 1967, the year of the Centennial, I was in the second grade. At school they had been handing out bronze medallions emblazoned with symbols that bore some bastard relation to the Maple Leaf, which I did not then know had only recently, and after some bitterness, replaced the Union Jack as the country’s official national symbol; and they were teaching us songs that bore some even more bastard relation to “O Canada!,” which I did not know would only thirteen years later, in 1980, when the song had already been in existence for a hundred years, replace “God Save the Queen” as the country’s official national anthem. All I really knew was that something was afoot, something big, to judge from the fanfare, though the whole enterprise, with its funny coins and its funny songs, had a suspect air, as if there might be homework involved or extra church services.

  By chance that year I came upon a teacher standing alone in the library AV room watching a news item on one of the TVs. On the screen, a man whom I remember as being in shirtsleeves was talking amid a mob scene that as a grown-up I would come to recognize as a media scrum.

  The teacher had an intent look.

  “That man is going to be our next prime minister,” he said without taking his eyes from the screen.

  I doubt I could even have said what a prime minister was at the time, let alone that we had one, and yet something not so much in the man on the TV as in the teacher’s reaction to him made the moment stick with me. It was as if I had caught a glimpse of a world I had never had access to before or had witnessed a moment of jarring intimacy, in the teacher’s naked, proprietary interest in someone in the news, someone on TV.

  I grew up in a town where the news until then had been mainly CBS or Time magazine and where we rooted for the Detroit Tigers and hoped for an end to the Vietnam War. I didn’t know about prime ministers, but I knew about presidents. Like much of the rest of the continent, I could remember exactly where I had been and what I’d been doing—watching the afternoon cartoons that served as my babysitter while my parents were out working on the farm—when I’d learned that JFK had been shot. Copper memorials of Kennedy and of another late John, Pope John XXIII, hung above the dining table in our kitchen, where they seemed to set the bar for the possible both in the Old World and in the New.

  It wasn’t clear in this mix what being Canadian might mean. Mainly it meant what we were not: for my immigrant parents, that we didn’t spend our money at the hotel the instant we earned it; for myself, that we didn’t stay clean when we worked, that we picked our teeth in public, that we ate homemade bread instead of store bought. Somewhere I had got the notion that the true height of being Canadian was to be British, and I had created an alter ego for myself who went around saying things like “Pip, pip!” and “Cheerio!” in a broad English accent. But for those of us in the immigrant boonies, the murky land of Canadianness was mostly only a place we visited from time to time, the way we went into town on Friday nights to do our shopping at the A&P.

  Maybe what struck me, then, in the library AV room was that simple possessive, “our prime minister,” uttered with none of the whiff of dutifulness or exclusivity that clung, say, to events like the Centennial. The man on the TV, of course, was Pierre Trudeau, and across the country that “our” would come to take on a great deal of nuance in the years to come. For that instant, however, it was my own, as if I had suddenly sensed a different possibility than the ones represented by the two dead Johns in my family’s kitchen.

  AS A NOVELIST I am used to people’s eyes glazing over whenever I make the mistake of trying to describe to them whatever book I’m working on. That was never the case with this particular book. Instead, at the mention of Trudeau, a certain light would come into people’s eyes—wistful or philosophic or diamond hard, but a light nonetheless—and they would launch without the least preliminaries into their own personal Trudeau stories. Many of these were encounter stories of one sort or another, usually told not with the breathlessness of a celebrity spotting but in a protective tone, the way you might speak about an eccentric acquaintance whose reputation you had some share in keeping safe. But just as many involved only encounters of the mind, entirely one-sided relationships that nonetheless went on for years, through all the twists and turns—elation, anger, bitter ends and rueful relapses—of extramarital affairs. What grew clear in this was that Trudeau remained a figure with whom so many of us continued to feel a peculiar sense of engagement, as if we hadn’t quite finished with him. It was also clear that this lingering connection had as much to do with what we needed to see in him as with what he was.

  There are few public personages who continue even beyond the grave to spark the range of opinion Trudeau does, from the viciously demonizing to the hagiographic. He was a great man, a dilettante, a visionary, a bastard; he was a communist, he was a fascist; “the disappointment of the century” or “one of those golden beings” who walked with the gods. He was arrogant and shy, fearless and thin-skinned, generous, stingy, a maverick, and more of the same. He was “William Lyon Mackenzie King in a min
i-skirt.” “A political leader worthy of assassination.” He was a twit. He saved the country; he tore it apart. He was a lady’s man. A man’s man. A boy.

  A 1997 Maclean’s survey ranked Trudeau down in the third tier of Canadian prime ministers, on par with the likes of Lester Pearson and Robert Borden. A few years earlier The Independent of London had given a different assessment, divvying up Canada’s prime ministers into two lonely categories: “those whom the rest of the world has largely forgotten, if it ever knew about them” and Pierre Trudeau.

  “I’ll climb, not high perhaps,” Trudeau’s motto was, after Cyrano de Bergerac, “but all alone.” Why, then, did so many of us follow him? One of the iconic images of Trudeau is of him dashing, suddenly, with a mischievous grin, from a flock of admirers seeking his attentions outside the Parliament Buildings. He was pushing fifty by then, a balding intellectual who had lived with his mother most of his life and who into his thirties was still seeking permission from the archbishop before reading anything on the church’s index of banned books. Yet he drew us on like a rock star, with that same mix of playing to us and eluding us, seeming to speak to some need we were barely aware of until he awakened it. “Not very badly,” he answered, when he was asked how much he wanted to be prime minister, and from that moment he seemed to have us eating out of his hand. We wanted him because he didn’t want us, the way we wanted an unrequited love. We wanted him because we didn’t know him. We wanted him because he always seemed more: more than met the eye, more than others had been, more than we’d hoped we could be. Because he seemed different, yet was one of us.

  If he hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him. In many ways, of course, we did.

  THE CLOSEST I EVER CAME TO TRUDEAU in the flesh was to stand at the back end of a crowded Toronto conference hall during the launch of one of the mostly unmemorable and unreliable summation books he was talked into ushering into print in the latter years of his life. As a child I had had the honour of second-hand contact when he reviewed the air cadet unit of one of my brothers, who reported back only that he was very short. Then in the 1980 election he caused a scandal in my hometown by agreeing to hold a rally at the upstart Lebanese Club rather than at the Italian one, something for which the Italians never forgave him, though as it happened his appearance was cancelled due to snow.