Pierre Elliott Trudeau Read online

  Trudeau’s strategy of deferral, in this regard, had one huge advantage: he could walk away at any moment with no loss of face. Another advantage was that the longer he remained uncommitted, the more he was plied with inducements. Pearson, who was determined he would be the country’s last unilingual prime minister, offered a large one: he arranged for Trudeau, as justice minister, to set out on a country-wide series of talks with the provincial premiers in preparation for a constitutional conference in early February. Thus, while the other leadership candidates were busy with the petty nuts and bolts of their campaigns, Trudeau stood above the fray, dominating the media day after day as he travelled the country and completely eclipsing the leadership race. At each stop he acquired new fans, including such unlikely allies as the fabled Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood and British Columbia’s long-standing Social Credit premier, “Wacky” William Bennett.

  Trudeau, however much the issue was to become a defining one for him, had initially been opposed to the constitutional talks. The constitution, he had said, with more foresight than he could have known, was “a can of worms” that would be hard to close again once opened. But now he rose to this challenge as he had to the others that had been put before him, with a confidence and a level of expertise that must have surprised all the fusty old-school politicians on the Hill who had initially dismissed him as a mere showman. The crowning moment came at the constitutional conference itself, which Trudeau dominated, outlining the federalist option in clear and precise terms and completely outshining Quebec premier Daniel Johnson. By now Trudeau was exactly where he wanted—and needed—to be: though he had yet to declare himself a candidate there was a groundswell of opinion for him to do so, though a scant two months before, as Trudeau himself noted wryly, the idea of his candidacy had never been mentioned.

  In this mix it is hard to sort out what was cunning on Trudeau’s part and what was luck, what was people imagining in Trudeau what they wanted to see and what was really there. Given all the behind-the-scenes machinations that went into placing Trudeau just so in the spotlight, the idea that he simply burst on the scene out of nowhere through the sheer force of his charisma doesn’t hold up. But neither does the argument that he had been calculating his rise from the start. Already from his nomination meeting in Mount Royal back in 1965 Trudeau had been prepared to bow out in favour of his one opponent, Victor Goldbloom, who was a “good man,” he’d said, and surely deserved the nomination as much as Trudeau himself did. Whatever strategy there may have been in this oft-repeated habit of playing the reluctant bride, what made it effective was that Trudeau was clearly bloody-minded enough to walk away from the prize without regrets if he couldn’t get it on his own terms. He had to be cajoled; he had to be convinced; he had to be kept to the path. Without a Marchand next to him, goading him on, or a Pearson or a Norman DePoe, he might simply have strapped on his skis and hit the slopes.

  The rest, as they say, is history. Trudeaumania, already in full swing by the end of the constitutional conference, seemed only to grow more fervent. It managed to carry Trudeau through the leadership convention in April and two months later through the election, where he won the majority that had always eluded Pearson. If anything, what seemed surprising in retrospect was that it had taken four ballots for him to win the leadership, and that if some of those candidates who bitterly opposed him had been smart enough to consolidate their support behind one of his rivals, he wouldn’t have won it at all. On the convention floor, Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh, not realizing the cameras were on her, pleaded with Paul Hellyer to withdraw and throw his support behind Robert Winters. “What’s the point of going down and letting that bastard be there?” she said. But the bastard won.

  There was one Liberal stalwart whose allegiance wasn’t in doubt, however. While Lester Pearson, as was appropriate, had kept up a look of judicious impartiality during the convention, allowing himself only the merest smile at the final numbers, his wife, Maryon, clearly smitten, couldn’t suppress her glee.

  IN RETROSPECT, despite the serious aberration that Trudeaumania was from the country’s usual habits, the whole phenomenon took on an air of inevitability, as if exactly what should have happened, had. But what had actually happened? A collective delusion, of the same sort that put demagogues in power? Or, seen more positively, a coming of age, a willingness to take risks, to bet, in Trudeau’s words, “on the new guys with new ideas”? For a moment, at any rate, our aspirations seemed incarnated before us in the flesh. Not a very long moment, as it happened. “Good Will for Trudeau, for a Time,” a Toronto Telegram headline read after the convention. For Maryon Pearson, the bloom went off the Trudeau rose within a couple of weeks. While she had been able to forgive Trudeau his jibes at her husband in the pages of Cité libre, she couldn’t forgive him the short shrift he gave Pearson after his leadership win, when, among other slights, he dissolved Parliament for the election before the House had had a chance to give Pearson the traditional tribute accorded to outgoing leaders.

  In any event, he didn’t have much need of Pearson after his leadership win: the crowds were mobbing him, women were kissing him in the streets, and the media was lapping it all up. Not everyone, of course, was on side. Despite the unprecedented level of interest in Trudeau, the election in June wasn’t exactly a rout. Although the Liberal popular vote rose by some 5 percent—a massive shift as far as winning seats was concerned—most of the gain was at the expense not of the main opposition parties, which held fairly steady, but of the Alberta-inspired Social Credit Party, which more or less disappeared at the time, only to resurface years later as the Reform Party after Trudeau had left the scene. What the numbers indicate, perhaps, is that however captivated Canadians were by Trudeau, they weren’t ready to give away the farm. From the start, in fact, the interest in Trudeau had as much to do with the fervour of his detractors as with that of his supporters.

  Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, in their seminal work Trudeau and Our Times, looked at Trudeaumania through the lens of sociologist Max Weber’s theories of charisma. Trudeau, in their view, presented the classic features of a political charismatic: a certain foreignness and a “sexual mystique,” among other qualities, but “above all, an extraordinary calling or vocation and along with it, the fighting stance of the crusader preaching social change.” For Clarkson and McCall, however, the Trudeau charisma was a mask hiding a reality that fell far short of the image. Marshall McLuhan had also taken note of the Trudeau mask, though his own, koanlike pronouncements on it sounded entirely approving. “This is your ‘cool’ TV power,” he wrote to Trudeau after watching one of the televised leaders’ debates. “Iconic, sculptural. A mask ‘puts on’ an audience. At a masquerade we are not private persons.”

  Whether we see it as a lie or a skill, a useful illusion or dangerous deception, Trudeau’s mask did indeed become many things to many people during his rise, tapping into a sudden desire or need for a hero in a country generally better at burying its heroes than raising them up. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which traces the basic narrative underlying most hero stories, may give us a framework for understanding the Trudeau phenomenon to put next to Max Weber’s.

  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

  Trudeau was the man who had studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne, who had caught the tail end of Mao’s revolution, who had travelled the world and ridden the white charger and wooed the fair maidens. Who had won the decisive victory and would bring home the boons, promised to us in what he called the Just Society.

  The Just Society. Trudeau, the great phrase-poacher, likely cadged this one from his former mentor F.R. Scott or from Plato, who had served Trudeau well more than once on the campaign trail. His first use of the phrase during the Liberal leadership convention
had seemed a stab in the dark, as if he had been reaching for something loftier, something at the level of LBJ’s Great Society, and had come up with only this slightly lame undergraduate substitute. Yet the phrase caught on. Over the years the Just Society would come to consist of whatever policy the Trudeau Liberals happened to be pushing that day, but at the outset what seemed to matter was the tone it caught rather than any specifics, how it seemed to join a Bob Dylanesque sense of changing times with the more traditional “peace, order, and good government” of something made in Canada.

  That, perhaps, beyond his Weberian charisma or his Campbellian heroism, was the truly bewitching thing about Trudeau for Canadians: he was made in Canada. The contradictions he resolved were our contradictions. For both anglophones and francophones, he seemed a model of being oneself and yet more than oneself, of being Canadian in a way that wasn’t defined by negatives. For immigrants, meanwhile, and for all those in the grey zone of the not-quiteincluded, he was the end of an old boys’ WASP hegemony, the man who rose from the outside to the top.

  It would take some doing to sort out all the ways we were wrong about Trudeau in those first heady days, just as we are usually wrong about our beloveds in the first throes of romance, when they are mainly just a blank screen for the projection of our own desires. Clarkson and McCall related how one of Trudeau’s old schoolmates came to visit him before he had declared his candidacy for the Liberal leadership and warned him that he was far too shy to be a political leader. Shy was not a word that the general public would have associated with Trudeau, then or afterwards, but it was one often used by the people closest to him. He had that way of projecting his opposite, though also of pulling us up short with the unexpected, until it was impossible to say what was projection and what was real.

  And yet, however mistaken we were in him, however unrealistic in our expectations, he still somehow managed to rise to every challenge. There would be other darlings who came after him who would enjoy their brief moments of deification—John Turner, Kim Campbell, Paul Martin Jr.—yet none would quite reach Trudeau’s height and all would fall more precipitously. For a happenstance prime minister he was amazingly suited to his job: he had studied federalism and constitutional law; he had a solid grounding in economics; he knew the world. Above all he had an unfailing knack for being in the right place at the right moment, and for flourishing there when lesser men would have foundered.

  With typical bravado, Trudeau had called for his first federal election to fall on the day after Quebec’s annual airing of nationalist sentiment, the festival of Saint-Jean-Baptiste. At the invitation of mayor Jean Drapeau, Trudeau, on the day of the festival, had joined a host of other dignitaries on the reviewing stand of Montreal’s Hôtel de Ville to watch as the parade filed by. There had been threats of violence if Trudeau showed up, and the police were out in force, but Trudeau himself sat front and centre on the reviewing stand, leaning out like a sports fan enjoying himself at a ball game.

  Suddenly a hail of rocks and bottles rained down on the stand from protesters across the street. There was a flurry of movement as the gathered dignitaries and their spouses scrambled to get clear, but Trudeau kept his place. A second volley hit the stand and this time Trudeau’s security men took hold of him to pull him away. He waved them off angrily and resumed his seat.

  A cheer went up from the crowd.

  The commentator for Radio Canada, which was televising the event, was unable to hide a note of awe.

  “Monsieur Trudeau insiste il veut demeurer sur place.”

  Mask or no mask, this was not the sort of moment you could fake. Rather, before you could think, your character was revealed: you were the sort who fled, or you were the sort who stayed put. The next day, as people went to the polls, the image of Trudeau sticking defiantly to his place played on every TV screen in the country.

  Once again, when the challenge came he was equal to it, as if he had been training for it all his life. In a sense, he had. Whether he’d got there by choice or by chance, whether he’d been urged there or had led others to urge him, when he came to the sword he had what it took to pull it free.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Against the Current

  The enduring image of Trudeau during his life, one he often encouraged, was that of someone who from a young age always chafed at conformity. His classmates took the side of the French, so he took the side the English; they spoke street Québécois, joual, so he made a point of speaking the French of Paris. In this way, Trudeau forged himself into the firebrand the country came to see him as when he was prime minister.

  We now know that this image of Trudeau as someone who had sprung out of the womb a rebel and an original was largely a construction. Trudeau himself more or less admitted as much late in life in the introduction to a 1996 collection of his writings, Against the Current, where he remembered that in his early years he was “more inclined to do and say the conventional thing” than to question what he was taught. Though he’d grown more rebellious by his teens, “the real sea change came” when he returned to Quebec after graduate studies abroad and found that his province “had become a citadel of orthodoxy with a state-of-siege mentality. To remain a free man in Quebec, one had to go against the current of ideas and institutions.”

  This admission by Trudeau really goes to the heart of his political formation, even if it can’t quite be taken at face value: he was the one who had changed much more than his province had, alive now to unpleasant aspects of his home culture to which he had been blind before his experience of the wider world. In many ways this more mature Trudeau, for all the sense people would later have of him as someone who had never wavered from certain core beliefs, came to hold views that were the polar opposites of those he had held as a youth. It would be hard to understand Trudeau’s later political trajectory without understanding this crucial transitional period in his life and the demons he had had to wrestle with before he had got through it.

  “MY CHILDHOOD having been a happy one,” Trudeau wrote, “I felt no need for ‘le doute méthodique.’” Happy, on the whole, his childhood may have been, but perhaps not quite in the generic way of Tolstoy’s happy families. Trudeau’s family stood out: a francophone father and anglophone mother, in an era when a kind of apartheid still reigned in Quebec between English and French; an increasing level of wealth that came not from some seigneurial past or from any of the traditional routes to respectability available to French Canadians—through the professions, mainly, particularly law—but through an entrepreneurial cunning that was entirely anomalous in French-Canadian society of the time.

  If there was a true original in the Trudeau family, it was not Pierre but his father, Charles. Charles had indeed trained in the law but quickly grew bored with it and turned his mind to other pursuits. Correctly predicting the great future that lay ahead for the motor car, he started the Automobile Owners’ Association, a sort of loyalty program that for a small membership fee offered discounted gas and repairs at Charlie’s growing string of service stations. In 1932, by which time he had thirty stations and fifteen thousand members, he sold the business to Imperial Oil for $1.2 million. Then he took the money and made such clever investments—in mining, mostly, but also in an amusement park and the Montreal Royals baseball team—that in the very heart of the Depression he quickly managed to turn a small fortune into a much larger one.

  Whatever hardships, then, Pierre may have endured while his father was establishing himself, by the time he was thirteen the family finances were such that money would not be a concern for him for the rest of his life. By then Charlie Trudeau, a hard-living bon vivant who dominated any room he was in and was forever holding late-night gatherings and jetting off to parts unknown, had apparently taken on a godlike status for the young Pierre, having managed by sheer force of will to pull the family up from the common lot into the upper crusts of Quebec society. Trudeau’s take on his father in later life was usually as this exalted figure, slightly distant and
unknowable, but all the more godlike for that. Yet the sheer energy of the man must have put a fright in him. It was Charlie’s irritation at his son’s frail, sensitive nature as a young boy that had started Trudeau on the path of the athleticism he was constantly parading in later life. In home movies of the time, Pierre was always mugging for the camera or engaging in antics that foreshadowed the ways his own sons would one day behave around him in an effort to get his attention. In any event, Charlie, in between his late nights and his business trips, set high standards for Pierre, and Pierre, whether in worship or terror, always did whatever it took to live up to them. Though by nature almost his father’s opposite—retiring where his father was the consummate extrovert and tending toward the refined where his father tended toward the crude—much of what he became could be seen as a kind of offering to him, a re-channelling of his father’s irrepressible energy and will through his own, very different character.

  “My father was gregarious, outgoing, expansive,” he told Gale Zoë Garnett years later. “I am not. Never have been. I am a solitaire, really. When I do something big and playful, like that pirouette behind the Queen, I am, I believe, pretending to be my father.”

  Just a few short years after he made the family rich, Charlie, never one to slow his pace for the sake of his health, fell dead from a heart attack. He was in Florida for the Royals’ spring training when he came down with pneumonia. Pierre’s mother and sister went to tend to him, though the next news Pierre and his brother Tip had in Montreal was of their father’s death. Fifteen at the time, Trudeau said afterwards, “His death truly felt like the end of the world.” His other reaction, however, was to think that “all of a sudden, I was more or less the head of a family; with him gone, it seemed to me that I had to take over.” It might be simplistic to read an Oedipal wish-fulfillment in this thought, though over the next years—when he wasn’t off at Harvard or the Sorbonne or chasing revolutions—Trudeau would come to fulfill this role as the family’s head mainly with regard to his relationship with his mother, Grace. When Charlie died, Grace came out of the shadows to become a dominating presence not only in the family but on the Montreal social scene, and the man who was invariably on her arm when she was out and about was her son Pierre, who kept rooms in the family home into his forties and didn’t marry until his mother had passed into senility.