Pierre Elliott Trudeau (11 page)

Together now with Trudeau, Lalonde’s group produced a manifesto in 1964 in which the term
functional politics
again figured very prominently. If his province was moving backward, Trudeau himself must have felt as if he was standing still. Fourteen years after the launch of
Cité libre
he was still pushing the same platform, and was still no closer to realizing it. Change had happened in Quebec,
dramatic change, and yet it seemed, just as Trudeau had predicted in an article in 1960, that French Canadians would “once again miss the turn.”

Perhaps he was the one, however, who had missed the turn. At least he had been able to get a job now, teaching at the Université de Montréal, yet halfway into his forties he found himself a mere academic, for all the ambitions he had had. Even
Cité libre
was slipping from him, caught up in a factionalism to which his own anti-nationalist views had given rise. The moment had come for change, and he had not been part of it. When the chance had come to replace the Union Nationale after Duplessis’s death, several of Trudeau’s colleagues and friends had run for the Lesage Liberals as René Lévesque had. Trudeau, however, had been down in Key West during the campaign, attempting to paddle to Cuba in a homemade canoe. Lévesque later claimed that Trudeau, too, had been asked to run, but others said he had never been approached.

The academic Léon Dion, father of the future Liberal leader Stéphane, had once described Trudeau as Quebec’s “most fascinating and disappointing intellectual of the 1950s.” It must have looked to Trudeau as if the 1960s would serve him no better.

Then came the call from Jean Marchand.

“An election is not a beauty contest,” NDP Leader Tommy Douglas said after Trudeau’s victory in 1968, echoing the feeling of many even within the Liberal Party that Trudeau had come to power more on show than on substance. There was plenty of truth to the charge, though part of Trudeau’s success had come exactly from playing down his actual assets. In 1969, he told
The New Yorker
that he had “probably read more of Dostoevski, Stendhal, and Tolstoy than the average statesman, and less of Keynes, Mill, and Marx,” even though he had read plenty of the latter three. This image of himself as being above the usual hurly-burly of politics had by then become part of his positioning. Already he was referring to himself as a “statesman” rather than a mere politician, a profession whose bad repute he had recognized all the way back in his play,
Dupés
.

The truth was that much less separated Trudeau from his two main rivals in the House, Douglas of the NDP and Robert Stanfield of the Progressive Conservatives, than met
the eye. Stanfield was only five years his senior, and would outlive him, and both he and Douglas probably shared more general culture with Trudeau than Trudeau shared with the hippie generation he had become associated with. In Terence McKenna’s 1994 documentary series on Trudeau, Trudeau admitted that he felt bad for Stanfield, who simply didn’t have the right image for the times, but to whom he was probably more closely allied in both temperament and outlook than to the made-up Trudeau of Trudeaumania. As for Douglas, he was a much more logical political father for Trudeau than Pearson had been, and surely part of Trudeau’s strategy of running more on image than substance had been to hide that fact.

Trudeau later said of the fans who had fuelled Trudeaumania that he wondered “how closely they were listening to my ideas, which sometimes I expounded rather dully.” He had good cause to wonder, given that many of those fans, like the girls who had chased him up Parliament Hill, were teens still several years from voting age and couldn’t have been much interested in theories of federalism. Within months of Trudeau’s election, that sort of star-struck adulation had lost much of its currency and the media emphasis had already begun to shift from a kind of boosterism to a mix of voyeurism and censure. At a
Commonwealth conference in London early in 1969, Canadian reporters stalked Trudeau on his various forays into the city and on his dates with German jetsetter Eva Rittinghausen and actress Jennifer Hales, then filed stories suggesting he was spending more time living the life of the playboy than meeting his obligations as Canada’s leader. At the end of the conference, Trudeau, just before rushing off to join Barbra Streisand and Princess Margaret for the London premiere of
Funny Girl,
gave reporters the first of the many tongue-lashings he was to administer to them over the years, lambasting them for their “crummy behaviour” and warning he might start prying into their lives as they had pried into his. “I think you once agreed when I said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation; I could even say that the nation has no place in the bedrooms of the state, and certainly not the press.” What seemed particularly to get Trudeau’s goat was that reporters had tracked down Rittinghausen, who had given several indiscreet interviews before falling mum, and had hounded Hales to the point where she had left her apartment for several days. Ironically, the coverage Trudeau received turned him into an instant celebrity among Londoners and completely stole the thunder of the other heads of state gathered there.

Perhaps reporters devoted so much attention to Trudeau’s social life because he failed to be especially controversial in his political one. At the conference, in the usual Canadian way, he set the tone for a constructive and peaceful discussion on the then tricky Rhodesia question, which had threatened to divide the conference on racial lines; and he reaffirmed Canada’s strong commitment to the Commonwealth, though he had earlier called it an anachronism. There was a complaint from one delegate that he had been a disappointment after the high expectations people had of him and that he had done more observing than intervening; there was also a complaint from Canadian students he had met with that he put off several of their questions by saying he would have to consult with his ministers before reaching a decision. The divide between the image and the reality was starting to show: beneath his panache lurked a typical Canadian politician. A year or so into his first term an interviewer said to him that after the great changes people had hoped for from him, his government didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. “I guess we’re not doing anything if you call running the country not doing anything,” Trudeau snapped back. The remark was less flippant than it sounded. For all his high talk about participatory democracy during the election and about “new guys with new ideas,”
Trudeau had some fairly basic, traditional notions about how government worked and about what it should do. As prime minister he was simply following the position he had always taken during his years at
Cité libre,
that it was much more important for government to tend to bread-and-butter issues than waste its energies on “revolution.”

To the charge that his social activities cut into his political ones he might have answered as he had at Brébeuf: “The truth is that I work.” Those who knew him on Parliament Hill, from his cabinet ministers, to his advisers, to his house staff at 24 Sussex, always attested, as his teachers had, to his discipline. It was well known that he liked his sleep and that he never arrived at the office early or left late. But he never went home without a package of work, and woe to the minister who arrived at a meeting the next day without having prepared for it as thoroughly as Trudeau himself had.

Unlike many of the prime ministers who preceded him, Trudeau required that all substantial issues come before the entire Cabinet for discussion rather than being simply presented as a
fait accompli
by the responsible ministry. The measure ensured a greater level of Cabinet involvement in major decisions, even if it meant not only more work for Cabinet members but a slower pace of decision-making and a burgeoning bureaucracy, as each department struggled to
keep on top of issues from other departments. As it had been at the Commonwealth conference, Trudeau’s preference was to observe discussion rather than dominate it and then to draw from what had emerged, a consensus style at odds with the common image of him as a man of set opinions with little tolerance for opposing views. Despite its drawbacks, Trudeau’s system not only held true to his promise to make government more democratic but made a great deal of sense, allowing the accumulated experience and expertise of the government’s senior members to be brought to bear on major questions. Since Trudeau’s time most prime ministers have reverted to the close-fisted style of old, keeping a much tighter rein on decision making.

Only halfway into his first term, Trudeau, in what became known as the October Crisis, faced perhaps the most formidable challenge of his entire political career, and one that came to define him in the eyes of Canadians in terms much different from his previous “swinger” image. On October 5, 1970, British diplomat James Cross was kidnapped from his home in Montreal by the separatist Front de libération du Québec. Five days later, only hours after the Quebec government turned down the demands of Cross’s captors, the FLQ struck again, kidnapping Trudeau’s old schoolmate Pierre Laporte, now provincial labour minister
in the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa, while he was playing football with his family on his front lawn. This second kidnapping, described in an FLQ communiqué as an act of retaliation for the government’s intransigence, gave the impression of a high level of organization and sparked fears that the FLQ had embarked on a wideranging terror campaign.

The FLQ had been active in Quebec since 1963. Mainly a loose collection of “cells” that formed from time to time to carry out specific actions, it had no clear central leadership and an ideology that shifted through its various waves, at times narrowly nationalist and at others more broadly Marxist and revolutionary. One of its major figures, Pierre Vallières, had actually served as the editor of
Cité libre
in the early 1960s, as part of an effort to bring in a younger generation; Vallières had repaid the gesture by mocking the journal’s founders and calling for revolution. By the mid-1960s Vallières had joined the FLQ and had been implicated in several bombings; his memoir
White Niggers of America,
written while he was in prison, had become the bible of the FLQ movement. Since its formation, the FLQ had been implicated in six deaths and in more than two hundred bombings in Quebec, including one in the Montreal Stock Exchange in 1969 that blew out a wall of the building and
left twenty-seven injured. The kidnappings of Cross and Laporte in October 1970, the first use of this tactic, suggested that the FLQ had graduated to a more sophisticated level of terrorism.

Less than a year earlier, Prime Minister Trudeau had met with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, at their request, as part of their Crusade for Peace tour. After the meeting, Lennon concluded, “If all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace.” The October Crisis, however, would transform Trudeau’s image in many people’s minds from that of peace-loving hippie wannabe to one of cold, uncompromising autocrat. Much of that shift went back to a single twenty-second television clip in which young CBC reporter Tim Ralfe, eight days into the crisis, was seen confronting Trudeau on the steps of the Parliament Buildings, asking him about the sudden military presence on the Hill.

“There’s a lot bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns,” Trudeau said to him. “All I can say is go on and bleed. It’s more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weakkneed people who don’t like the looks of—”

“At any cost?” Ralfe interjected. “At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?”

Trudeau responded with the phrase that he would most be remembered for.

“Well, just watch me.”

Three days later, the man who had been praised by John Lennon for his peaceful ways invoked the War Measures Act and turned the country into a virtual police state, suspending civil liberties and sending tanks and thousands of troops into the streets of Montreal. Quebec police initiated an immediate crackdown, arresting without charge hundreds of supposed FLQ sympathizers—including well-known writers, entertainers, labour leaders, and members of the Parti Québécois—the vast majority of whom turned out to have no link to the crisis. The day after the measures were introduced, as if in direct retaliation for them, Pierre Laporte was discovered strangled to death in Montreal in the trunk of a car after an anonymous call to a local radio station.

At the time, there was overwhelming support in both Quebec and the rest of Canada for Trudeau’s hard-line stance, though in the following months and years, particularly as information began to emerge about police abuses not only at the time but both before and after the crisis, public attitudes began to shift, especially in Quebec. Most damning were the revelations that the RCMP had carried out a number of actions after the crisis to indicate continuing
FLQ activity, including issuing false FLQ communiqués, stealing dynamite, and infamously burning down a barn that belonged to an imprisoned FLQ member’s mother, in an incident that was to become a symbol of RCMP perfidy. Given that anti-terrorist police had so infiltrated the FLQ by that point as to constitute virtually its only members, the RCMP activities seemed aimed not at terrorism but at discrediting the separatist movement as a whole and in particular the Parti Québécois, whose membership lists the RCMP stole in 1973 from the party offices in an action they called Operation Ham.

Trudeau correctly predicted that the murder of Pierre Laporte would be the death knell of the FLQ, which in fact completely lost public support afterwards. But the killing was not the death of separatism. On the contrary, the October Crisis seemed to push the separatist movement toward political maturity. Separatism was now able to present itself as a peaceful alternative to the FLQ while still drawing on the underlying support for the FLQ’s objectives and on the memory of federal troops occupying the streets of Montreal. Trudeau’s “Just watch me” began to seem more and more the epitome of the arrogance of the federal government, which was willing to ride roughshod over the aspirations of the Quebec people in order to safeguard its own
power. In English Canada, meanwhile, the statement came to represent the betrayal of the ideals that the 1960s generation had invested in Trudeau, who was now revealing himself as merely another pillar of the establishment.