Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read online

  TO WHAT EXTENT, then, had Trudeau’s vision succeeded? To judge from my own experience, not much. When I arrived in Montreal in 1984, it was true, the word on the street was that nationalism, for lack of interest, had died a quiet death: after the failed referendum and then the failed constitution, people had turned their attention to other matters. The young were more interested in finding jobs than in planning revolutions, and they were enrolling en masse in ESL courses to make up for their forced education in French under Bill 101. Meanwhile there was talk of a “victory of the cradle” much different from the one Quebec’s Catholic Church had promoted earlier in the century. From having had one of the highest birth rates in the world then, Quebecers now had one of the lowest, so that soon the immigrant population would so have shifted the Quebec demographic that any hope of a successful referendum would have vanished.

  By the time of my departure, however, the atmosphere in the city had completely changed. Out of nowhere, it seemed, crowds numbering in the tens of thousands were suddenly marching in the streets, as nationalist sentiment reared its hydra head again. If there was a single culprit to blame for the resurgence it was the mandarin on the hill, well into retirement now: Citizen Trudeau. Under the provisions of his Charter, the Quebec Court of Appeal had ruled unconstitutional the section of Bill 101 prohibiting English signs. All over the city, placards went up on people’s balconies. “Ne touchez pas à la loi 101!” Hands off Bill 101. Suddenly all the old sentiment was there, all the sense of outrage. Robert Bourassa was back in office by then, after the demotion of Claude Ryan and the implosion of the PQ, and when the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the ruling of the Court of Appeal, Bourassa pulled out his nationalist colours to assure the public that the law would stand. Stand it did, as Bill 178, this time bearing the proud imprimatur of the Charter’s “notwithstanding” clause. This was not the first time the clause had been invoked: René Lévesque, after the constitution had been passed into law, had bitterly attached it to every piece of legislation that had crossed his desk before he left office in 1985. But Bill 178 was the first use of the clause in specific response to a court ruling.

  What had briefly felt like an end, then, turned out to be the merest lull. Over the next years it would seem that all of Trudeau’s work had been for naught, that it had merely sown the seeds for another vicious cycle of polarization between English and French. From the Charter came the challenge to 101; from the challenge came all the old nationalist bitterness; from the bitterness came the disastrous 1987 Meech Lake Accord of Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. While the accord was a perfectly legitimate attempt to do what Trudeau in 1981 had promised to do “in the coming weeks” but had never got around to, namely to find a way to bring Quebec into the constitution, it ended up fanning the flames of nationalist sentiment rather than putting them out, reopening the constitutional “can of worms” that Trudeau had claimed to have closed definitively. The accord’s three-year timeline for ratification, required because it changed the constitution’s amending formula, made it a sitting duck, providing ample opportunity for opposition to fester and grow against controversial clauses such as the one recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society.”

  When the accord failed, however, once again the fingers pointed to the man on the hill. As he had done at the Paul Sauvé Arena, Trudeau had intervened at the crucial moment, publishing an open letter in the Toronto Star and Montreal’s La Presse bemoaning that the federation “set to last a thousand years”—an odd allusion to Hitler’s thousand-year Reich that he later assured Peter Gzowski he had meant ironically—had not foreseen “that one day the government of Canada would fall into the hands of a weakling.” Mulroney, Trudeau claimed, had “sold out” to the provinces and to the “snivellers”—read Premier Bourassa—from Quebec. The man whom his son Justin would praise at his funeral for teaching him never to attack the person, only the idea, was clearly willing in this case to break his own precepts. But then, point by point, he dissected the accord, painting a picture of a Canada where the federal government had become a mere tax collector, doling out everything it received to the provinces to spend as they saw fit. It was everything Trudeau had fought against. A confederation of shopping centres.

  Before Trudeau weighed in, the accord had unanimous approval from the provinces, near-unanimous approval among the federal parties, and substantial approval among the general public, particularly in Quebec, where politicians and citizens alike had been especially pleased with the longcoveted special status Trudeau had always opposed. Afterwards, however, things began to fall apart. In extensive testimony before the Senate and the House, speaking without text, Trudeau made the argument against the accord, bringing to bear the full powers of his “legalistic” mind. “I think we have to realize that Canada is not immortal,” he ended, “but, if it is going to go, let it go with a bang rather than a whimper.” Meanwhile Canadians, heady with their new post-Charter rights, began to wonder aloud how issues of such fundamental importance had come to be decided by eleven overfed white men meeting behind closed doors at a lakeside retreat. As opposition mounted, however, so did the old tensions. A handful of anti-French incidents in the anglophone provinces received wide play in Quebec, so that any opposition to Meech came to be cast as the rejection, once again, of Quebec’s aspirations. An infamous trampling of the fleur-de-lys in Brockville had a life that stretched over many months in the Quebec media, even though it had been a protest not against Meech but against provincial downloading of the costs of bilingualism.

  Governments had come and gone by the time of the deadline for ratification. By then the “distinct society” clause had been so watered-down by amendments that Lucien Bouchard had left the Conservatives to form the Bloc and Robert Bourassa, not for the first time, had begun to waver. But the accord’s initial, albeit symbolic defeat, had nothing to do with English or French: it came when First Nations MPP Elijah Harper raised an eagle feather in the Manitoba legislature to dissent on a vote to bypass public consultations that had required unanimity. Harper felt that the First Nations had not been properly consulted in the accord process.

  Though a legal route was later found to get around the impasse in Manitoba, Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells killed the accord definitively when he refused to bring it to a vote in his legislature. Once again, Trudeau had won. In a rough equivalent of Lévesque’s “Il m’a fourré,” Mulroney would still be fulminating against Trudeau years after Trudeau was in the grave, pulling no punches against him in his memoirs and calling the demise of Meech “a death in the family” that had left him with “a throbbing sense of loss for one of the greatest might-have-beens in Canada’s 140 year history.” The blood had hardly dried over his Meech defeat, however, before Mulroney was back at the table again pounding out the Charlottetown Accord, a super-Meech that included public consultations and a grab-bag of new enticements, including strengthened Aboriginal rights, a triple-E Senate—equal, elected, and effective—and a “Canada clause” that said, in essence that, while Quebec was special, the “Rest of Canada,” as it had now come to be known, was special too. From La Maison du Egg Roll in Montreal, one of his favourite haunts, Trudeau pronounced on Charlottetown: “This Mess Deserves a No.” In the referendum that followed, Canadians took his advice and voted “No.”

  The decisive “No” vote in both English Canada and Quebec, however, was read less as a sign of a growing solidarity than of a widening gap. The accord covered such a wide range of issues that it provided almost everyone with something to object to. Yet thanks to a vocal minority in each of the solitudes—led by Preston Manning’s fledgling Reform Party in English Canada and by the PQ and the Bloc in Quebec—the issue of too little or too much for Quebec was the one that lingered. Despite Trudeau’s Herculean efforts at holding the country together, it seemed that Canada, as Lord Durham had put it back in 1838, was still “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state.” In the 1995 Quebec referendum that the Charlottetown Accord
had been a desperate attempt to avert, the war came within a hair’s breadth of splitting the country, a single percentage point separating the “No” from the “Yes.” The “No” forces had been led by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, as despised by Quebec nationalists as Trudeau had ever been but not nearly as respected. Chrétien, in a move that may nearly have cost him the country, had specifically asked Trudeau to keep silent during the campaign.

  On the twentieth anniversary of the Constitution Act of 1982, when Trudeau himself had already been dead a year and a half, every party leader in Quebec’s National Assembly, including the former federalist Jean Charest, stood up in the Legislature to roundly denounce, in no uncertain terms, Trudeau’s constitution. For those who back in 1968 had imagined on the one hand that here, finally, was a man to make a place for Quebec, or on the other that here was a man to put Quebec in its place, it could surely only seem that the Trudeau experiment had been a flop.

  Federally, in the post-Trudeau era, the political landscape has become hopelessly balkanized, with no party able, or in some cases willing, to claim anything like a national mandate. Separatism has not died, but rather has become virtually a national institution, so that it is hard to remember how the country ever got along without it. Westerners continue to loathe the East, guarding their old grievances and always ready to add new ones. This, then, is the post-Trudeau One Canada. Meanwhile, despite the exchange programs and the immersion programs and the French and English on our cereal boxes, the level of bilingualism, according to Census Canada, rose a paltry 5 percent between 1961 and 2001, from 12 to 17 percent. Even those numbers are deceptive, skewed as they are by Quebec, the one province where bilingualism is actively discouraged, but where it runs at an alarming 40 percent; in the “Rest of Canada,” it has stagnated at 10 percent.

  Depending on how all these data are interpreted, the country is either going to hell in a handbasket or is humming along more or less as it always has. The Liberals have never done well in the West, nor the Conservatives in the East, and many regional parties have come and gone. Since Confederation more than a dozen parties have elected members to the House of Commons, including the Ralliement créditistes, a separatist-leaning Quebec splinter party that under Réal Caouette elected nine members in 1965 and fourteen in 1968. And while Calgary will likely never become meaningfully bilingual, or Toronto, despite the legions of parents sending their children into French immersion programs, Ottawa has become so, a situation that would have been unthinkable in the Ottawa Trudeau arrived at in 1950, as has Montreal, and as have Moncton and Sudbury.

  The jury, then, is still out. This much is true: so far, the country has held. It continues to function, in fact, much as Trudeau envisioned, as a struggle among competing powers with competing interests that somehow works to the benefit of the people. The Canadian population has always understood federalism, tending to play its provincial governments against its federal ones. This is another of the contradictions that somehow found its still point in Trudeau: that what has held the country together has been exactly the forces that have always seemed on the verge of tearing it apart. Perhaps, going right back to the Conquest, when the British began almost at once to buy the compliance of the French Canadians with rights and privileges, English Canada has always needed a Quebec to appease, just as Quebec, in the way of all minorities, has always needed an English Canada to rail against to keep itself strong.

  In the end it may simply have been the case that Trudeau’s individualist vision was fundamentally incompatible with the more collectivist one of many of his fellow Quebecers. Yet the Quebec he left behind at his death was more or less the Quebec he had fought for: economically solvent, politically left-leaning, and with one of the highest standards of living in the world. It was a place utterly transformed from the Quebec of his childhood and from the years of la Grande noirceur of Duplessis. From the closed, puritan society of his youth Quebec had become practically its opposite—secular, cosmopolitan, progressive, vibrantly democratic. Moreover, it had managed to sustain the strength of the French language and had experienced a flourishing of culture that made it a model of innovation and cultural self-sufficiency. All this it had achieved without special powers or special status, without so much as even having signed the constitution, within the uncomfortable but familiar straitjacket of the Canadian federation. In 1993, after criticism from the United Nations Human Rights Committee, it even quietly dropped the “notwithstanding” clause from its language legislation and found the way to bring it within conformance of the Charter.

  Once again, Trudeau had won.

  A FEW YEARS AGO, on a return visit to Montreal, I took a commemorative stroll past Trudeau’s house. A CBC crew was there, interested not in Trudeau, by then dead, but in the Cuban Consulate across the street. Back in my day the place had been decked out like a Hells Angels clubhouse, festooned with security cameras and barbed wire owing to a spate of firebombings by anti-Fidelistas, but now—a sign of the times—it was undergoing a condo conversion. I had never quite known what to make of Trudeau’s chumminess with the Cubans. His little tête-à-tête with Fidel Castro at Cayo Largo had always seemed the political equivalent of Margaret’s night with the Rolling Stones. Was it pure showmanship? A snub at the Americans? Yet in this, too, Trudeau was following in a Canadian tradition that went back to John A. Macdonald, who knew that snubbing the Americans was the surest way to gain credibility with Canadians. Trudeau claimed at the time that he was merely continuing a diplomatic relationship begun by John Diefenbaker, which was in fact the case—Diefenbaker had defied both Eisenhower and Kennedy to maintain relations with Cuba after the Castro takeover. As questionable as the visit seemed, Trudeau was at least consistent: he had scooped Nixon in 1970 in recognizing Red China, and he brought a level of sensitivity to Soviet relations that ran completely counter to the Cold War logic of the Americans, which he had always despised.

  Trudeau had visited each of these places before he entered politics: China in 1949 and again a decade later with Jacques Hébert, the Soviet Union for an economic conference in 1952, and Cuba in 1949 to cut sugarcane.

  While I stood outside Trudeau’s house watching the CBC crew, a woman with a lapdog came up to me.

  “Did you know him?” she asked.

  “No, no.” I felt slightly ashamed at this. “I never met him.”

  “We used to have coffee sometimes. As friends. I met him in an elevator once and he invited me for dinner, and then we stayed friends.”

  A feeling of unreality came over me. There seemed something delusional in such a casual reference to the man, as if he were merely a local eccentric to talk fondly of, now that he’d gone. With a start, I realized what had been omitted in the comma between “invited me for dinner” and “then we stayed friends.” So she had been a conquest.

  “He was very gentle, you know. Very funny. Of course, if he gave you supper the portions were always very small.”

  The woman mentioned in passing—could this have been true?—that one of Pierre’s neighbours had been none other than René Lévesque. She showed me the building up the street where he had had a condo, before he’d moved out to Nuns’ Island.

  Did they run into each other? Did they get along?

  “Oh, you know, they were old friends since the 1950s. All the rest, it was just politics.”

  It hadn’t looked like just politics at the time.

  Across the way the CBC crew was still checking camera angles on the old Cuban Consulate. It seemed they had missed the real story.

  “I still feel sad sometimes,” the woman said. “That he’s gone.”

  AN ARROGANT S.O.B. That was the assessment one often heard during his political years, as the stories were retold. Trudeau giving the finger to protesters in Salmon Arm. Saying to the grain farmers in Saskatchewan, “Why should I sell your wheat?” Shoving the National Energy Program down the throats of Albertans. Here is Robert Mason Lee’s take on the NEP: “Did the eastern bastards, at the end of the
day, ever freeze to death in the dark? Did the Alberta oil taps remain closed? Did the US industry forever abandon Alberta’s sedimentary basin? Did the ‘Canada lands’ ever turn an honest dime? Do we now have Canadian control over the oil industry? Are our resources protected from the cupidity and avarice of the world markets? Of course not. Everything about the NEP as a policy instrument was ephemeral and illusory, but this much was real: My house dropped in value by one third overnight; my brother lost his job; my father, who had put his money into real estate at Uncle Allen’s urging, saw his last chance of a comfortable retirement fly away like cinders. Whatever other objectives it might have claimed, the NEP was cruelly efficient at economic assassination.”

  A Keynesian idea whose time had gone. It may be some years, still, before the Liberals can rebuild in Alberta.

  Trudeau was not always tactful, that much was true. In his final campaign, in 1980, his handlers were careful to keep him away from crowds because of his colourful ways with hecklers. But back in Salmon Arm, he would have said, they had deserved it: they were waving anti-French placards. And in Saskatchewan, with those farmers, the question had really been a Brébeufian rhetorical flourish, part of an argument about the importance of marketing boards. The farmers of Saskatchewan, however, had apparently not been in the mood for rhetorical flourishes.