Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read online

  Over the previous days, Trudeau had merely listened to the premiers’ proposals and rejected them one by one. He would later say his strategy had been “to make a certain number of concessions” that would split the ranks of the Gang of Eight, but he had yet to offer any. Then on the third day, he declared that the talks were at an impasse. He had a proposal, however: that they bring the British North America Act home as it was, then put the premiers’ constitutional package next to his own and let the public choose between the two in a referendum vote.

  The idea was one he had borrowed from himself. Trudeau had always included a referendum clause of this sort in his own reform packages, as a way of allowing the public to break any future constitutional deadlocks. His strategy in proposing the idea now was spur of the moment, he later implied, yet he knew that the English premiers despised referendums, while the separatists were great promoters of them.

  At the table, none of the anglophones took the bait. But then Trudeau, in his version of events, put the question to Lévesque during the coffee break.

  “Surely a great democrat like yourself won’t be against a referendum?” he said, no doubt a response to Lévesque’s jibe about his “authoritarian” federalism. In Clarkson and McCall’s account of the exchange, Trudeau went on to taunt Lévesque like a schoolyard bully. “You’re the great believer in referendums. You can’t be opposed to one.… Or are you afraid to take me on?”

  As he had with Claude Ryan the year before, Lévesque, in Trudeau’s words, “rose to the bait. I think he answered instinctively, without remembering that he was in the Gang of Eight, and said: ‘Well, I can buy that.’ I think he had in mind that this would be his chance to avenge his loss in the 1980 referendum, because I remember him saying, ‘I would like to fight the charter.’”

  It was Lévesque’s third strike. He had broken the common front. Even his own team didn’t realize at first what he had done, making jubilant phone calls back to Quebec City while Trudeau, who had either been lucky, or brilliant, or utterly Machiavellian, deadpanned to reporters: “We have a new alliance, between the Quebec government and the Canadian government.” But then he added with a mischievous smile, “And the cat is among the pigeons.”

  Canadian history since then has rested, perhaps, on that single Lévesque gaffe. That afternoon, as the federal team began to suggest the terms of a referendum, which Lévesque said looked like they were “written in Chinese,” it grew clear to the Quebec team that Lévesque had made a fatal misstep. The backroom negotiations started even before the premiers had broken for the day, up in a fifth-floor kitchen of the conference centre, where the p’tit gars de Shawinigan and the two Roys, Saskatchewan’s Roy Romanow and Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry, were already cobbling together the first draft of what would come to be known as the Kitchen Accord. In fact, Chrétien and the Roys had been working out a counterdeal ever since the Supreme Court decision had come down, waiting for the moment to try to push it through. They got it when Lévesque unexpectedly broke ranks with the Gang of Eight.

  Chrétien and his assistants worked through the night, making calls to the anglophone premiers at their Ottawa hotels and meeting with members of the provincial delegations in the Saskatchewan suite of the Château Laurier. By dint of trade-offs and concessions and tinkering with clauses and codicils, they managed by morning to bring on board all seven of the anglophone members of the Gang of Eight. Lévesque, meanwhile, staying over in Hull, was never called.

  OF THE HEADS OF GOVERNMENT who ended up signing the accord on November 5, 1981, sixteen years to the day since Trudeau was first elected to Parliament, the last holdout was Trudeau himself. He would later do what he claimed never to do: express regret, seeming genuinely disappointed at some of the concessions he was talked into in the final hours of negotiation. It was in these frenzied late-night discussions that the infamous “notwithstanding” clause entered the agreement, as a swap for minority-language education rights. To Trudeau, the clause risked making his Charter into a farce. Meanwhile, the provision for a referendum in the event of a federal–provincial deadlock had been removed. Trudeau insisted he would rather return to his original plan of unilateral patriation and a referendum, even though one of his only two provincial allies, Richard Hatfield, had made clear he now opposed the idea.

  Then late in the night Trudeau got a call from Bill Davis. If Trudeau passed up the deal, Davis said, he would be on his own. It was Davis who tipped the balance. Trudeau knew that with not a single province behind him, his chances at Westminster, in the face of the Supreme Court decision, would be extremely slim.

  When news of the accord was made public, the tone in English Canada was one of cautious approval. A CBC report that followed the signing had a celebratory air, with the fact of Lévesque’s exclusion tacked on toward the end, as if it were merely a sad but predictable footnote. “Once again,” Lévesque said, “Quebec is where it always has been, alone,” coming across a bit like Malvolio shaking his fist and vowing revenge amidst the general merriment at the end of Twelfth Night. The news report raised no question of Trudeau’s promise at the Paul Sauvé Arena or of how an accord that actually reduced Quebec’s powers could constitute a fulfillment of it. And while Trudeau expressed sadness that Quebec had not signed and he promised to work “in the coming weeks” to bring Quebec into the final package, he didn’t, on this matter, express regret.

  The tone of approval in English Canada had much to do with the fact that Trudeau the Intransigent had finally, like a good Canadian, made some concessions. An editorial in The Globe and Mail called the deal “A set of compromises in the true Canadian tradition. Every first minister has given up something dear to him. Mr. Trudeau has given up much.” But then the piece went on, somewhat astoundingly, to praise Trudeau for burying the French question.

  Perhaps most important, he has diminished the importance of Mr. Levesque’s [sic] opposition, by being himself a French-Canadian Prime Minister, who had more Quebeckers behind him in his last election than had Mr. Levesque [sic]. This fight was not, though Mr. Levesque [sic] strove to present it as such, a French-English fight.

  The comment was typical not only of the flawed understanding of Quebec politics in English Canada—the facts suggested that Quebecers had re-elected Lévesque exactly because they wanted him at the constitutional table—but of the general feeling that Lévesque had merely got what he deserved. Again, Trudeau’s promise of change had been forgotten. For most English Canadians, in fact, the fine print of the deal was of little interest. What seemed more important at the time was less the substance of the deal than its symbolism: after a hundred and fourteen years, Canada, at last, had brought the constitution home. Back at the failed Victoria Conference of 1971, Trudeau had bemoaned what he said was “the last remnant of a condition that is not worthy of Canada as a free and independent country,” namely that it could not amend its own constitution. He had changed that. He had pulled the sword from the stone. Many Canadians must have wondered why it had taken so long.

  In Quebec, of course, as with most things, the accord played differently. Chrétien’s night of “horse-trading” would come to be referred to, without apparent irony, as “The Night of the Long Knives,” a reference to Hitler’s famous purge of his political enemies.

  “Every one of them hated the goddamn son of a bitch,” Lévesque said afterwards of the other premiers. “For their own particular reasons. But none of them had a vision of politics that couldn’t be turned by a couple of cocktails.”

  Eventually, the constitutional accord would take its place next to the October Crisis as one of the great perfidies committed against the Quebec people by the traitor Trudeau. In the case of the accord, however, the charge had much greater cause. Lévesque had had a mandate from Quebecers to negotiate change, to hold Trudeau to his promise, and Trudeau had run roughshod over it. In agreeing to an accord that reduced Quebec’s powers, whether he did so out of expedience or pure desperation, he had betrayed his promise of 19
80. Trudeau afterwards played with the numbers to suggest, as the Globe editorial had, that the federal Liberals’ strength in Quebec constituted support for the accord, but the success of the separatist Bloc Québécois in later years was surely fed by Quebecers’ lingering sense of betrayal over the constitution and their loss of trust in their federal representatives. While it was the breakaway Conservative Lucien Bouchard who formed the Bloc in a split with Brian Mulroney over Meech Lake, it would be the federal Liberals who would most feel the effects, being no longer able to rely comfortably on their Quebec base.

  In the immediate aftermath of the talks, however, Lévesque took it on the nose in Quebec as much as he did in the rest of Canada. Claude Ryan raked him over the coals in the National Assembly, saying that far from being the victim of “diabolical machinations” among the anglophone premiers, he had been done in by “the hopeless contradiction of a provincial sovereignist negotiating for renewed federalism.” Meanwhile, his own party was pressing him for either a new election or a new referendum. “Il m’a fourré,” Lévesque had said in tears on the plane back to Quebec, just as Ryan had said before him. He screwed me. But no one got points for being outwitted. Two native sons, two titans, had clashed, and Trudeau had come out the winner. Lévesque was never to recover.

  “If Trudeau had become a separatist in the 60s,” journalist Denise Bombardier remarked, “Quebec would be independent by now.”

  Of course, Trudeau was Trudeau because he hadn’t. It was the one time, perhaps, that he had truly gone against the current, almost alone among his set in bucking the nationalist trend of the Quiet Revolution. It was not an easy turning, leading not only to lifelong rifts with people like his old mentor and friend from Brébeuf, François Hertel, but to a feeling of betrayal among a younger generation who had been looking to him as their hero and who, as Quebec journalist Malcolm Reid observed, could not forgive him the “cool, assured tone” with which he distanced himself from their fiery nationalism. “How could he live in the smothering of liberty and not cry, not scream, not scribble on walls, not take to drink or dynamite?” But he had already been there and found it a dead end; it was exactly what had given birth to the “functional politics” he had announced in the first issue of Cité libre and had stuck to ever since.

  However cynical Trudeau became by the final years, and however much he played off his promises to achieve his own ends, there was a continuity, at least, in his vision. In Federalism and the French Canadians, he had reached the conclusion that “federalism has all along been a product of reason in politics. It was born of a decision by pragmatic politicians to face facts as they are, particularly by the fact of the heterogeneity of the world’s population. It is an attempt to find a rational compromise between the divergent interest-groups which history has thrown together; but it is a compromise based on the will of the people.” This had always remained for him the appeal of federalism, that it based itself not on ethnicity and emotionalism but on practicality and the common good. Trudeau may have come to this stance by way of the cauldron of his own crises of identity, but the reason he stuck with it was because it made sense. And if he had patched it together via Harvard and Harold Laski and China and the Khyber Pass, it was, in the end, a very Canadian stance.

  Historian Michael Bliss, in his article “Guarding a Most Famous Stream,” has made the argument that far from being the political maverick he was often portrayed as, Trudeau followed very much in the traditions of the prime ministers who had preceded him. “Pierre Trudeau was undeniably more abrasive, arrogant, tough, aloof, solitary, and selfcontained than traditional politicians,” he says, and

  brought to the prime ministership intellectual skills, life experiences, and values different from those brought by most of his predecessors. Once in office, however, he was not as unlike them as even his own ornery reflections imply. He brokered competing interests, bought political support, and doled out patronage in the grand Canadian manner. He stood firmly on guard for Canada when it was menaced. He greatly expanded the freedoms of Canadians. In these regards he was a true inheritor of the mantles of William Lyon Mackenzie, Sir John A. Macdonald, Wilfred Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson, even John Diefenbaker. Some maverick.

  Just as he had done when he was a student at Brébeuf, Trudeau had found the way in politics to marry the stance of the rebel to the slog of getting on with the job. “The truth is I work.” It was such a quintessentially Canadian sentiment, as true of the habitant stock of New France and the Scots Presbyterians and Irish refugees of Upper Canada as of the First Nations running their traplines and the latter-day immigrants of every hue. Perhaps our attraction to him came exactly from this, that however different from us he seemed, however much the outsider, we sensed he was one of us. He gave the impression of adventure and change even as he affirmed the general flow of things as they were. Rebellion without risk. A very Canadian sort of rebellion. Or put differently: he showed us how to be ourselves, but to do it with style.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He Haunts Us Still

  In the mid-1980s, I did graduate studies in Montreal with the vague intention of making myself a better, more bilingual Canadian. If I became a better Canadian, however, it was probably less from my immersion in our other official culture, which felt much more remarkably foreign than I had expected, than from my tuning in to Peter Gzowski’s Morningside every day while I had my breakfast. My apartment was near the downtown non-campus of Concordia University, and every day for nearly two years I would walk up one of the side streets north of Sherbrooke that had formed part of the old Golden Square Mile of the city’s longgone Scots elite to an outbuilding of Montreal General where I met with a Freudian analyst, as Trudeau himself had once done in Paris.

  I didn’t know about Trudeau’s analysis then, though I knew that at his retirement he had purchased a house on Pine Avenue not two hundred paces from the little path that led up the slope of Mount Royal to my analyst’s outbuilding. He had paid $200,000 for it, the papers had said, which seemed a respectable sum at the time for someone of his eminence and means. When I finally dared to sneak a glance at the house, however, I was surprised at how unimpressive it looked, a tiny, boxlike place that clung to its narrow lot on that busy stretch of Pine without the least flourish or marker to set it apart. Later I would learn it had been built by Ernest Cormier, the designer of the Supreme Court building in Ottawa, and that it was considered an art deco masterpiece. At the time, however, I thought Trudeau had gone a bit far with his legendary frugality and might at least have sprung for a proper front lawn.

  Every day as I trudged up the foothills of Mount Royal to my session, and particularly as I trudged down again and my back was to him, I thought of Trudeau perched in his little fortress on Pine Avenue. I had no particular desire to run into him, fearing, perhaps, that something would be lost then: he would prove truly as short as people said, or would snub me, or pick his nose. Yet it was Trudeau, perhaps single-handedly, who had brought me to Montreal. I had dutifully taken French all through high school and had even learned some; I had gone to Winter Carnival; I had done a month of intensive French at the Alliance Française in Paris. I had chosen Montreal for my graduate studies not because of the schools, of which I knew almost nothing, but for one reason only: the French. Who but Trudeau could I blame for this? He may not have invented bilingualism, but he had made it sexy; he might never have uttered the phrase “two solitudes,” yet it was surely because of him that I felt obliged to break them down.

  By the time I left Montreal in 1988, it would have been fair to say that my experiment in national reconciliation had been a resounding failure. By then I had come to realize that I was indeed what had seemed to have been stamped in my passport when I’d first arrived, an anglophone, and that the hard work of building cultural bridges, in Montreal as elsewhere, was exactly that, hard work. Who had the time, really? Between classes and coursework and psychoanalysis and worrying about datelessness and the state of
the world, there weren’t many hours left in the day for nation building. At Concordia, at least in the English department, the two solitudes still reigned—in two years of classes I met a single francophone Quebecer, around whom an aura of suspicion hung because he had thrown in his lot with the anglos when everyone knew the real action was in the other camp. Meanwhile a joint lecture series on literary theory that Concordia had organized with the Université du Québec à Montréal had deteriorated into a bit of a farce: in the search for a “neutral” location, the organizers had chosen a venue out near the old Expo site that required three bus transfers from downtown and a call ahead to the security guard to warn him you’d be coming. The lectures alternated between English and French; the francophones went to the French ones, and the anglophones to the English.

  My own French, I quickly discovered, was not quite at the level that made conversing with me in it really worth the bother. It was just as well, as most of the francophones I ran into in the course of a day also spoke English, a language I was quite fluent in. In the four years I spent in Montreal, less French crossed my lips than in the single month I had spent at the Alliance Française in Paris. I had no one to blame for this except myself, though perhaps in a slightly less laden atmosphere—Togo, say, or Martinique—I have might been more willing to risk humiliation. It could have been that I simply never built up a sufficient escape velocity to cross over, to leave the familiar. But the more time that passed, the easier it became to stay in my little world, so that what had seemed incredible to me when I arrived, that there were people who had lived in Montreal all of their lives who didn’t speak a word of French, made perfect sense to me when I left. Some years later I spent several days entirely immersed in francophone Montreal promoting the French translation of one of my novels, and I felt as if I had entered a completely different city than the one I had lived in for four years.