Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read online

  These entirely unremarkable near-misses accurately reflect, in a way, the very peripheral place that Trudeau had in my own life. Despite that glimmer of awareness in the library AV room, it is still the assassination of Robert Kennedy and not the election of Pierre Trudeau that I remember most viscerally from June 1968; if I was aware of Trudeaumania, it was with that baffled sense the young often feel at the seeming absurdity of grown-up behaviour. By the time I was dragged into anything like real political awareness, by a precocious friend who browbeat me into canvassing for the NDP in the election of 1974, the Trudeau honeymoon was long over. Soon enough even the NDP seemed entirely too establishment to me, so that I was never to vote for Trudeau or his party and was never to understand, during his reign, his two great obsessions, Quebec separatism and the constitution, the former of which seemed a matter of personal vendetta and the latter of trumped-up legacy building. And yet far more than any other Canadian public figure, Trudeau was formational for me. At no point during his regime could I have described in any detail his political philosophy or even have named, beyond his sheer persistence, his political accomplishments; yet I always felt him at my back. In this, it seems, I was not in any way distinctive but entirely typical of my generation.

  Two episodes beyond my AV-room awakening stand out in my own Trudeau story as emblematic of the peculiar hold he had on me. The first occurred in the Canadian history class I took in my final year of high school, by which time Trudeau was already an overly familiar fixture on the political scene. Our teacher was one of those who had never forgiven Trudeau for the War Measures Act, but one of my fellow students presented a seminar on him that brought home to me, maybe for the first time, the irreverent iconoclast he had once seemed to the nation, a man who had caught the tail end of the communist revolution in China, who had thrown a snowball at the statue of Stalin in Red Square, who had set out for Cuba from Key West in a homemade canoe. “Citizen of the World,” he’d had posted to his dorm room door at Harvard. I would discover that this high-minded sentiment was fairly common at universities, once I got to one myself, and yet I was to spend many years trying to live up to it, most of them without understanding the contradiction that lay at the heart of it. Incarnated as it was in Trudeau, the phrase seemed to hold out the possibility of being a Canadian without quite having to be one. Of being Canadian and more than Canadian. Of making the “more than,” somehow, not the negation of Canadianness, but the essence of it.

  The second episode took place during the summer after my first year of university, when I had in fact set out on a Trudeau-like quest across Europe using $1,500 I had left over from a student loan. The quest turned out to involve many more lonely hours waiting for rides at expressway on-ramps than I had bargained for and nowhere near as much enlightenment or sex, but along the way there were those few special moments when the reality came breathtakingly close to the fantasy. One occurred in Norway. I had had a hellish time with mosquitoes and rain in the north of Sweden looking for the midnight sun, but then I had entered into God’s country, coming down through Norway across stunning mountains and fjords that went on in endless succession.

  I had caught a ride with a kindly young pastor moving house from north to south.

  “I would like to visit one day to your side,” he said, “but of course it is always the U.S. I think to come to, not so much Canada.”

  Who could blame him, really? Canada the quaint. Canada the forgotten.

  He dropped me on the Oslo road. The next car that pulled up—in my idealized memory of the event it is a convertible, and the top is down, and the Norwegian air is pellucid under a brilliant northern sun—turned out to be the dream ride, the sort every hitchhiking male prayed for but never got: five Norwegian blondes, and not the quiet, mousy, world-shy ones of the mountains but the feisty, progressive blondes of the south. I was packed into the backseat between two of them, where I felt utterly overwhelmed. Then came the inevitable question, where was I from, and my squeaky reply.

  “Canada! How wonderful!”

  It was as if I had come from Valhalla, to tell them the news from the other side. What they wanted to know about: Maggie and Pierre. So this was the sort of tabloid gossip it took to be known in the world, to have a bit of cachet. Back home, of course, the whole sordid affair had already passed from the merely tawdry to the downright embarrassing. Yet even in my disdain there was a pride, a sense of affirmation: I came from a place of sufficient complexity to have a scandal of international proportions. It was like wearing genuine Levis, say, instead of the BiWay knock-offs I’d had to wear as a kid. The difference between holding your own and non-existence.

  “We don’t pay that much attention to them anymore,” I said lightly, riding the high of my celebrity for days afterwards even though I’d been dropped not five miles down the road when the girls reached their turnoff.

  IT WAS ONE OF THE PARADOXES of Trudeau, the antinationalist, that he brought to so many Canadians a sense of national identity they could finally live with. In some way he spoke to the contradictions at the heart of us, to our being this nation of many nations that often felt like no nation at all—one that barely had its own flag or its own song, that still looked to London and Paris and New York for its culture and to Washington for its politics. A place that was “not so much a country,” as Mordecai Richler once put it, “as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.”

  None of these propositions was quite as true after Trudeau’s reign as before it. As much as anything, this shift in our collective self-perception was a matter of style. From the moment Trudeau appeared on Parliament Hill in his Mercedes roadster it was clear something had changed: here was a man who seemed afraid of nothing, who went his own way, who had none of the cultural cringe that was the Canadian norm. It has always been an open question, of course, how much of that style flowed naturally from him and how much of it was strategic. His “Not very badly” of 1968 looks a little disingenuous next to the ample evidence in his archive that he had been honing himself for politics from a young age. Trudeau was not the sort to stint when he set himself an objective. Sickly and weak by disposition as a child, he turned himself into a superb athlete; shy in crowds, he sharpened his debating skills and became a formidable orator. Far from having been dragged into political leadership, he seemed to have been training for it all his life, perfecting his talents with the precision of a master craftsman. This coldly calculated version of Trudeau doesn’t quite square with Trudeau the gunslinger, the man who spoke his mind, yet the calculation was there, perhaps not so much as one makes an object for some specific use but as one makes art, including flourishes for their own sake. There is that aspect to Trudeau’s life, when it is read in full, the sense of a man with the leisure and means—would that we all had them—to consciously fashion his life as one might fashion a work of art.

  Works of art are about much more than style, of course. They are about style in the service of content, or more correctly about style as content, about the point where the two merge. Style, really, is what makes it possible for art to be art, to hold a hundred balls in the air without dropping any, to contain in a single package unresolvable contradictions—and the really good contradictions are the unresolvable ones—without splitting apart at the seams. Trudeau was nothing if not a package of contradictions. The anglophone French Canadian. The woodsy sophisticate. The rich socialist. The passionate man of reason. Follow any thread of his life and you inevitably end up in some paradox. The fierce advocate for human rights who went spearfishing with dictators. The devout Roman Catholic who took buggery off the law books, gave us no-fault divorce, and laid the ground for abortion on demand. And yet, like a successful work of art, he hung together. There was a wholeness to him that we looked to, and a breadth of character that gave sanction to our own contradictions, and our own hopes.

  While doing the research for this book I often felt as I did a few years ago doing research for a novel on the life of Jesu
s: that I had stepped into a war zone of vested interests and scholarly bloodletting, with no opinion unpartisan or untainted. Interestingly, Jesus, like Trudeau—though I wouldn’t want to carry this analogy too far—was another of history’s contradiction-bridgers, surely one of the reasons his story has had such staying power. That is the fate of some stories: they speak so deeply to our hopes and fears, to the disjunctions of our lives and our wish to overcome them, that they pass from art to myth.

  Michael Valpy, describing myth as what “reveals the deep patterns of meaning and coherence in a culture,” what “shows us who we dream ourselves to be,” has made the argument for Trudeau as “our one truly mythological prime minister.” There remain legions of dissenters, however, particularly in Quebec and in the West, who still grow apoplectic at such appraisals, and for whom the only proper application of the term myth to the Trudeau legacy is in the sense of unholy fiction, of a great lie perpetrated on the Canadian people. Even here the contradictions repeat themselves, for the more we learn of Trudeau, the more those two opposing summations of him seem inextricably intertwined.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1968 and All That

  Nineteen sixty-eight was one of those watershed years in human history that was almost enough to make even the most cynical believe in astrological forces. In France it was the year of May ’68; in Poland, of March ’68; in the United States, of Chicago ’68. It was the year of the Prague Spring. Of bra burning. Of Hair.

  In Canada we tend to look at 1967’s Expo as the evidence that we, too, even before Trudeau arrived on the scene, had been moving toward our own ’68. Thinking of Expo 67 as a precursor to the spirit of 1968, however, is a bit like thinking of Sunday school as a proper warm-up for a Grateful Dead concert. In the United States, in 1967, they had the Summer of Love: tens of thousands of youths descending on Haight-Ashbury from around the world with flowers in their hair and sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll on their minds. All this was a far cry from the official government ditties of Expo and its images of happy families and of high-end futurist real estate. The Summer of Love was a sort of pollination event for 1968, sending its converts back out into the world to spread the good news about turning on and dropping out, though it was also a warning of the ephemeral nature of hippie ideals, quickly deteriorating into a sordid scene of crime, souvenir hawking, and drugs.

  Most of us have learned by now to hang our heads in shame at the memory of hippie drug culture, though it may have been that hippies were merely self-medicating to dull the pain of forever banging their heads against the status quo. What we often forget is that in the short term, at least, the real story of 1968 was as much about the crushing suppression of the human spirit as about its assertion: in France, the massive protests gave way to betrayals and backroom deals that ended in the re-election of the Gaullists, stronger than ever; in Czechoslovakia, two hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops turned the Prague Spring into a Soviet winter. In China, one of the last hopes of Western Marxists after the disappointment of Stalin, 1968 was the year that Mao’s take on counterculture, the Cultural Revolution, completed its pendulum swing back to iron-fisted tyranny after leading the country to the brink of chaos. Meanwhile the United States saw the assassination of Martin Luther King; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; and finally the election of that great standard-bearer of 1960s radicalism, Richard Nixon. Even bra burning, often cited as the inaugural moment of second-wave feminism, has been overbilled: the term arose after a smattering of protesters outside the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City dumped bras, girdles, and various other symbols of women’s oppression into a trash can, though the suggestion of setting fire to them was swiftly quashed by local police. On television sets across the nation, meanwhile, the Miss America pageant carried on uninterrupted.

  Around the world, then, the most immediate outcome of 1968’s sudden flourishing of a new order was the brutal reaffirmation of the old one. Next to this titan clash of cosmic forces, an event like Expo 67 begins to seem, well, decidedly Canadian. Expo was not about counterculture but about Culture, with a very capital C—about claiming we actually had one. It wasn’t about taking down the Establishment but about establishing one.

  “Now for me in those years,” journalist Rick Salutin has written, “what has since become a great icon of Canadian potential—Expo 67—signified nothing.” Salutin, back then, had done what any proper Canadian radical needed to do: he had left the country. “But Trudeau,” Salutin goes on, “—mere news reports about him—moved me.”

  This is a remarkable statement coming from someone who was hobnobbing at the time with the Maoists and Fidelistas of the New Left down in Harlem and Washington Square. If Expo was no logical place to look for the spirit of 1968, then one would hardly have expected to find it in the Liberal Party of Canada, whose front man until then, Lester Pearson, was considered too boring and nice even by mainstream Canadians. When Pearson announced his retirement at the end of 1967, the principal contenders for his job were people like Paul Martin Sr. and Robert Winters and Mitchell Sharp, who were as establishment and staid a group of stuffed shirts as you could poke a fickle finger of fate at.

  In this pack, Trudeau’s candidacy initially seemed a kind of joke. Here was someone whose only connection to the federal Liberals before 1965 had been to poke vicious fun at them in the pages of his magazine Cité libre. In 1963 he had taken particular aim at Pearson, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, referring to him as “the defrocked prince of peace” for allowing American nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. Yet a mere two years later he had stood for election as a Liberal MP, and within weeks of arriving in Ottawa was serving as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary. Back in Quebec, Trudeau’s only involvement in party politics until then, apart from a brief flirtation with the NDP’s predecessor, the CCF, had been in ad hoc leftist movements and coalitions that he had quickly lost interest in or that had self-destructed. To many of his old political colleagues in Quebec—people like Claude Ryan and René Lévesque, with whom he had been allied in the fight against the corrupt regime of Maurice Duplessis—Trudeau’s defection to Ottawa seemed so much a departure from any of his previous leanings that they were left dumbfounded.

  As with many of Trudeau’s seemingly cavalier gestures, there was probably a lot more calculation in his jump to the Liberals than met the eye. Yet it is almost certain he would not have made it—and hence that none of what happened to him in the crucial next three years would have come about—if he had merely been left to follow his own inclinations. Despite the image that has come down to us of Trudeau as the loner, as the one who followed his own road, at almost every crucial juncture in his life there was some significant figure whose influence over him was definitive. Looked at in this light, his meteoric rise begins to seem neither the happenstance event it was often played as at the time nor the coldly calculated one it was later suspected of being. Rather, Trudeau seems to have been urged toward his path by the people around him almost despite himself, as if they saw more clearly than he did that some mark of destiny lay on him, that the moment would come when no one but he could draw the sword from the stone.

  One man whose role it would be hard to overestimate in this period was Jean Marchand. Marchand, a union organizer and populist with tremendous street credibility in Quebec, was the real star the Liberals were after in 1965, in a desperate bid to rebuild their Quebec base after several of the more prominent Liberals there—always a touchy subject in Quebec—had fallen to scandals. Marchand had first met Trudeau during the Asbestos Strike of 1949, when the young Trudeau, to Marchand’s chagrin, had fired up the striking miners with revolutionary rhetoric as if he were preaching to his schoolmates rather than to men who had access to dynamite, and the will to use it. Nonetheless, Marchand had been struck by the ability of this citified member of the elite to speak to uneducated workers in terms they understood. He had kept up only sporadic contact with Trudeau in the intervening years, but when the Liberals approached Marchand in 196
5 to head their Quebec team, he refused to sign on unless he was allowed to bring with him his friend Gérard Pelletier, then the editor of La Presse, and, somewhat bafflingly, Pierre Trudeau.

  Somehow Marchand managed not only to talk the Liberals into accepting Trudeau—this was a man who not long before had publicly condemned them as imbeciles and trained donkeys—but to talk Trudeau into accepting the Liberals. Trudeau was apparently in high spirits after agreeing to run, as if he were merely setting out on another of his great adventures. But he was to falter many times along the road, and each time it was Marchand who set him back on course. It was Marchand who talked him out of running in the rural riding of his ancestors and wrangled a safe urban one for him, the upscale and largely anglophone Mount Royal; it was Marchand who convinced him to stay in the race when Trudeau discovered he would be up against his old friend, the philosopher Charles Taylor, who was running for the NDP. Then in Ottawa, when Trudeau initially turned down the offer to serve as Pearson’s parliamentary secretary—as it happened, Trudeau was on a ski trip in the Alps when Pearson reached him—Marchand was on the phone to him at once. In the memoirs Trudeau published in 1993, he recalled Marchand’s reprimand: “What brought us here is that there’s a job to be done, and we have to grab every opportunity to do it.” One suspects that Marchand’s actual terms were a bit more colourful.

  Marchand, it seemed, had Trudeau’s number, spurring him forward with a mix of coaxing and bullying that might have reminded Trudeau of another significant male in his life, his father, Charles. Charles Trudeau, who died of hard living when Pierre was fifteen, had been in the habit of weeding out weakness from his son by challenging him to overcome it. In the first grade, for instance, when Pierre complained of a problem with his teacher, Charles refused to intervene, sending the shy young Pierre off to the school principal to solve the matter himself. The strategy worked: Trudeau proved so successful at meeting these challenges that they became a sort of addiction, each one emboldening him for the next until he came to seek out anything that smacked of a dare. Jean Marchand somehow understood this side of Trudeau and learned how to use it, goading him again and again into actions that flew in the face of the expected but that clearly had an appeal for Trudeau precisely for that reason. It made sense, as historian John English suggests in the first volume of his two-volume biography of Trudeau, Citizen of the World, that Trudeau would balk at accepting an offer from Pearson that would have him working so closely with a man he hardly knew and had never much liked. But once Marchand framed the job as a challenge, Trudeau embraced it wholeheartedly. Marchand, with shrewd prescience, foresaw great things for Trudeau, predicting to a Quebec colleague in Ottawa just after the election that Trudeau would be the Liberals’ “big man in French Canada” within a year, “eclipsing all the others.”