Pierre Elliott Trudeau (4 page)

It was a fateful choice. By late December 1967, the Criminal Code amendments—which, among other changes, decriminalized homosexuality and contraception and legalized abortion under certain conditions—had been cleaned up and introduced in the House. Suddenly Trudeau was in the national spotlight, receiving accolades from every corner for tackling issues no one else had dared to saddle themselves with. This would later appear to be the moment when Trudeau finally came into his own, outstripping expectations and justly earning his political stripes. Yet once again there is the question of how much he seized the moment and
how much he was manoeuvred toward it. The legislation itself, the product of many hands and of years of hard-won consensus, Trudeau could hardly take much credit for; all it had required was the right man to push it through. One can almost imagine that Pearson, taking a page from Marchand, had actually instructed the bureaucrats to warn Trudeau off of it, knowing that Trudeau would surely go for it then. In any event, whether by fluke or by calculation, Pearson had once more put Trudeau exactly where he needed to be. It may have been no coincidence that only days before the legislation was introduced Pearson had announced that he would be retiring the following spring, so that almost at once people began bandying Trudeau’s name around for a possible leadership bid, a prospect that would have seemed fanciful even a few weeks earlier.

As much as anything, it had been Trudeau’s way with the
mot juste
that had made such a coup of his legislation. In the media scrum following the introduction of the bill, he had staked his claim on the country’s imagination with the line “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” It was a brilliant phrase, one that fit perfectly the spirit of the times, and that so much came to embody the public image of Trudeau as forward-thinking and clear-headed and no-nonsense that over the years even Trudeau himself seemed to
forget that he had more or less cribbed it from an editorial earlier that week in
The Globe and Mail
. No one in the media seems to have caught the borrowing at the time. No matter: Trudeau, quite literally, had made the phrase his own. Nor did the media take the trouble to parse its tacit reference to the removal of sodomy from the Criminal Code: an entirely laudable change, and long overdue, but one that might not have played so well to the general public of the day if it had been spelled out in all its specificity. Instead, journalists, by and large, took the high road, branding Trudeau a gifted phrasemaker and essentially setting the stage for his leadership bid.

Perhaps Trudeau had merely caught the media on a good day. What seems truer, however, is that if people like Marchand and Pearson were quietly urging Trudeau toward the starry crown, then the media, at least in English Canada, were waiting to place it on his head. Peter Gzowski’s portrait of Trudeau in
Maclean’s
back in 1962 had set the tone for the English take on Trudeau, presenting him as the angry young Renaissance man, equal parts athlete and connoisseur and
engagé
intellectual. Aspects of Trudeau that his acquaintances in Quebec had always regarded as signs of a certain dilettantism were thus transformed into parts of a complete, wellintegrated package. Over the next years Trudeau was to attract
a growing fan club in English Canada that included journalists like Peter Newman and Pierre Berton and intellectuals like historian Ramsay Cook and media guru Marshall McLuhan.

An episode of CBC-TV’s
Newsmagazine
that aired in May 1967, just after Trudeau’s appointment as justice minister and months before he had risen to anything like national prominence, was typical of Trudeau coverage of the time. It began with what was then a common slip, knocking three years off Trudeau’s age to put him at forty-four instead of forty-seven, and called him “one of the younger cabinet ministers in our history,” though Jean Chrétien and John Turner, appointed to Cabinet at the same time as Trudeau, were both much younger (Turner thirty-seven and Chrétien a mere stripling at thirty-three). The interviewer, a very fatherly looking Norman DePoe, then made a slightly tortured connection between Trudeau and Sir John A. Macdonald, as if to establish a sacred lineage. Much of the interview that followed, under the guise of dredging up some of the shadows dogging Trudeau’s appointment—his inexperience, his unconventional opinions, his questionable past—was merely a set-up for Trudeau to make humbly manifest his wide experience and his wide learning.

Well along, DePoe paused to ask the very question that his viewers might have been asking themselves: “Why a pro
gram about Trudeau rather than some other equally new and equally promising cabinet minister?” There followed a lengthy resumé that presented Trudeau as “the first real chance for the turned-on generation to have a real voice in national affairs,” and that gave Trudeau’s status as “a rebel and a swinger” equal weight with his impressive life experience and his academic credentials (in addition to his law degree, “higher degrees” from Harvard, the Sorbonne, and the London School of Economics were mentioned, though Harvard was the only one of these institutions Trudeau ever actually graduated from). The summary performed the by then familiar gestalt of transforming a past full of the sorts of gaps and incompletions that would have prevented most people from landing decent jobs into a well-balanced, scintillating whole. The encomium ended thus: “Most of all, though, he cares.”

Fawning
might not have been the right word for this sort of treatment: DePoe was intelligent throughout, he asked difficult questions, he showed an understanding both of the times and of history. His tone, however, was manifestly paternal, as if he had found a promise for the future and was helping Trudeau along his path. Trudeau was playing his part, the humble servant of the Crown, yet the impression the interview leaves now across the distance of years is that
it was not so much either Trudeau or DePoe who were in control as some outside force, some bigger narrative the camera was merely the instrument of.

A coda to the piece went on to make the obligatory references to Trudeau’s impressive athleticism and way with the ladies—“Trudeau, the bachelor sports car driver, frequently escorts some of the most ornamental and intelligent women around, and for him they must be intelligent”—and then ended with a question that would have seemed strange at the outset but by now had an air of inevitability: “Do you want to be prime minister some day?” Trudeau, sheepish, answered with a “Hell, no” that was delivered not quite as believably, perhaps, as the “Not very badly” of his leadership campaign many months later. Yet he seemed sufficiently flattered by the question to suggest that there was still the innocence in him of someone who would never have believed he would be sitting in the prime minister’s office in less than a year.

Whatever Trudeau’s later, much more fractious relationship with the media, in English Canada at this point he could do no wrong, as journalists like DePoe lined up behind Trudeau’s other father figures to push Trudeau forward as the favoured son. Writer and editor George Galt has pointed out that what these journalists were probably feeling was relief: here, finally, was someone like them. Trudeau had
been formed not in the political backrooms but in the journalistic trenches, having cut his teeth in the 1950s writing the sort of no-holds-barred political commentary that represented exactly the ideals many of these journalists aspired to. The prospect of such a man holding political leadership must have seemed a tantalizing one to them, as if they themselves were the ones acceding to power.

Trudeau’s media profile in Quebec was more complex. He had already had a substantial media presence there before entering politics, and couldn’t play the young ingenue unaware of his own powers or count on the rosy lens of halfknowledge to hide his blemishes. His defection to Ottawa had embittered many of his former allies in Quebec’s increasingly nationalistic elite, the very people who, after the death of Duplessis, had taken control not only of Quebec’s political machinery but of its media. Now that Trudeau was a declared federalist, any pronouncement from him, particularly on the French question, was greeted either skeptically or with scorn. It was still a protective scorn, however, the scorn reserved for one of their own, underlain with a grudging pride in this man who had stepped boldly among the English wolves and was being taken seriously by them. Trudeau’s contention that he had gone to Ottawa to show that Quebecers “could play with the big boys,” though it had
a typically cavalier ring to it, actually touched on one of the deep insecurities underlying Quebec nationalism: the fear of not being able to “make it” outside the safe confines of home. That was really what lay at the heart of Trudeau’s by now vehement rejection of the nationalists: the perception—almost unique to him at the time—that their increasing sway under the Quiet Revolution was merely a continuation by other means of the insularity and narrowmindedness of Duplessis’s “Great Darkness.”

Ironically, Trudeau’s Criminal Code legislation, which would have been anathema under the old, church-based Quebec nationalism of Trudeau’s youth, actually played well in the new, post–Quiet Revolution Quebec. The province had so long been under the yoke of the Catholic Church that when it broke with it, it did so precipitously, quickly moving from being one of the most priest-ridden societies on earth to being one of the most secular. Despite an outcry from the church establishment, Trudeau’s reforms struck a responsive chord in the province, particularly in the cities and among the educated elite. In the media the emphasis was much less on the man behind the bill than on the bill itself, with round-table discussions on the social issues it raised and soul-searching documentaries on subjects like the marginalization of homosexuals. Yet for Trudeau the timing,
again, was ideal: here was a bill that compromised none of his own political beliefs and yet fit in perfectly with the agenda of the new nationalists, who may even have been grateful for this chance to show their approval of their native son without seeming to. In any event it could not have been lost on Quebecers that it had taken someone from home, from the traditionally “backward” province, to bring the rest of Canada out of the Dark Ages.

WHEN TRUDEAU ANNOUNCED
his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party on February 16, 1968—he was the last to do so, a mere month and a half before the convention, though at a point when Trudeaumania was already in full swing—he told reporters that they were to blame for his decision. They had started what they had thought was “a huge practical joke on the Liberal Party,” he said, daring the Liberals to choose someone as unconventional as himself as their leader, and had ended up being taken seriously. Given the amount of backroom strategizing that we now know preceded Trudeau’s announcement, his depicting his run as a kind of accident comes across as somewhat disingenuous. Already over the Christmas break, not two weeks after Pearson had announced his resignation and while Trudeau himself was vacationing in Tahiti and meeting the girl who
would eventually become his wife, a few choice associates back home had begun secretly organizing for his potential candidacy. Still, he might never have put himself forward if the various forces urging him on hadn’t reached a kind of crescendo in the first weeks of 1968.

The crucial push came, again, from Marchand. He was the one from the start whom the Liberals had been thinking of as a credible successor to Pearson, to keep up the Liberal tradition of alternating English- and French-Canadian leaders. But Marchand hadn’t taken to Ottawa. His health was failing; he was known to imbibe. “It’s a crazy job,” he had told his friend André Laurendeau, co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, “worse even than being a trade unionist—there at least you’ve got roots.” Unlike Trudeau, Marchand hadn’t quite been able to leave home. In particular, he didn’t “like to speak English all the time; it diminishes me by fifty per cent.”

Early in the new year, Marchand, Trudeau, and Gérard Pelletier, who had set off together for Ottawa little more than two years earlier, met in Montreal at the Café Martin. “The Three Wise Men,” they had been dubbed in English Canada at the time, though in Quebec, somewhat less charitably, they were known as
Les trois colombes,
“The Three Doves.” Marchand had remained their front man and strate
gist, though now, over dinner, he told the others that he would not run for the Liberal leadership. Trudeau had surely suspected this change of heart by then. Six months earlier Marchand had even taken the line that the francophones shouldn’t run any candidate at all, since the current nationalist climate in Quebec would inevitably cast any francophone leader as a mere apologist for the English. But Trudeau must also have suspected that it had surely crossed Marchand’s mind more than once to put Trudeau himself forward as a candidate, particularly in the weeks since his Criminal Code bill, given the frequency with which that suggestion had been cropping up in the national media.

According to Pelletier, however, Trudeau was “stunned” when Marchand presented exactly this option. Whether he was actually stunned or only strategically so we will never know: by this point, when people were already working behind the scenes to set up a campaign office for him, Trudeau had entered into the kind of cat-and-mouse game he was so good at, growing more deferential and coy the more people insisted. The historical consensus, in any event, is that Trudeau would surely never have run if Marchand had chosen to, and his seeming shock at Marchand’s proposal may have been simply the realization that his candidacy was no longer just a kind of intellectual game but a real
possibility. In later life, Trudeau admitted that he had often appeared most cavalier about the things he’d been most afraid of failing at, and this may have been one of those moments, never seen publicly, when his reach suddenly came up against his fear.

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.