Working the Dead Beat (7 page)

After Bob Jacobs died of lung cancer in 1996 — in a hospital he had helped design — she remained in their Annex house, continuing to write books and to respond to calls to engage in neighbourhood and city protests, including an unsuccessful struggle against the amalgamation of the City of Toronto with its outlying boroughs in 1998.

Her adopted city of Toronto honoured her in 1997 by sponsoring a conference titled “Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter,” bringing together a wide range of diverse thinkers who shared a proclivity for thinking outside the box. The conference spawned a book by the same name and the Jane Jacobs Prize
,
which offers a $5,000 annual stipend for three years to an “unsung hero” engaged in “activities that contribute to the city's vitality.”

No matter how frail Jacobs became — she had a hip replacement in 2000 — many people thought of her as indestructible and remembered that her mother had lived past a hundred. But her mother had never smoked, a habit that Jacobs had enjoyed with furious intensity for decades before she finally butted out her cigarettes. Smoking she could give up; working was something else. Even in her late eighties she was under contract to write a short history of the human race and an anthology of her thoughts about economics.

Inevitably old age caught up with her and “her body wore out,” according to her son Ned Jacobs. In announcing her death at Toronto General Hospital on April 25, 2006, at age eighty-nine, her family said in a statement: “What's important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life's work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas.” And if you don't, her son warned, “there's a
Dark Age Ahead
.”

 

Pierre Trudeau

Statesman

October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000

A
S ENIGMATIC AS
he was complex, as combative as he was charismatic, Pierre Trudeau was the fifteenth prime minister of Canada. He championed bilingualism, multiculturalism, and national unity; he patriated our constitution and gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has defined modern Canada and become a model for the world.

Trudeau arrived in the House of Commons in 1965, as the junior member of the federalist trio led by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier, whom Prime Minister Lester Pearson had recruited to bolster the Quebec wing of his caucus. A law professor and a neophyte politician who had worked briefly in the Privy Council Office more than a dozen years earlier, he was an intellectual who had studied at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and L'institut d'études politiques in Paris and then travelled the world, juxtaposing theory with the rough realities of life on the road. An athlete and an outdoorsman, he was given to testing himself on rugged canoe trips, punishing treks, and daredevil ski runs. A shy and introspective bachelor who lived with his widowed mother well into his forties, Trudeau was also a renowned ladies' man who cut a mean figure on the dance floor. Abidingly Catholic, independently wealthy, a graduate of the elite Jesuit-run Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, he had flirted with militant ultra-nationalism as a student at the Université de Montréal, protested against conscription in the Second World War, and failed to enlist in the armed forces. Yet he grew out of his insular pro-nationalist phase, emerging as a civil and human rights activist who defied repressive Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis in
Cité libre
, the political magazine he co-founded in 1950.

In their book
Trudeau Transformed
, Max and Monique Nemni argue that they could have written several biographies of Trudeau, concentrating on him as an athlete, a scholar, an adventurer, a heretic, a believer, or a ladies' man. None of these would have worked, they contend, because they would provide only slices of the man. His strength and his appeal came from the powerful and often odd contrasts among the myriad components of his character and upbringing. His many private sides and personal angles — above all his belief in individual liberty, social justice, and federalism — combined in unusual and unexpected ways to make him the most memorable Canadian politician of the twentieth century.

JOSEPH PHILIPPE PIERRE
Yves Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal on October 18, 1919, the middle child of Grace Elliot, an anglophone of Scottish descent, and Charles-Émile Trudeau, a rural Québécois lawyer-turned-entrepreneur. Growing up, Pierre moved from one language to another like a paddle slicing through the still waters of a northern lake (what other francophone politician of his day had the linguistic ammunition to sneer, “Zap, you're frozen,” at a stunned Robert Stanfield to deride the Opposition leader's campaign pledge to freeze wages and prices to combat stagflation in 1974?).

His father grew rich after selling his string of automobile service stations to Imperial Oil during the Depression for the then-staggering sum of more than a million dollars, but the family always lived modestly, even after they moved to Outremont, an affluent section of Montreal. “My father taught me order and discipline,” Trudeau once said, “and my mother taught me freedom and fantasy.”

After his father died suddenly of a heart attack in the spring of 1935, when Trudeau was fifteen, he grew even closer to his mother. He also grew more introspective and took up karate and boxing, developing the pugilistic skills and the stance of the solitary warrior that he would later use to his rhetorical advantage in debates and on the campaign trail. A team player he was not.

When he accepted Pearson's invitation to run in the safe Liberal riding of Mount Royal in the 1965 federal election, Trudeau was forty-seven, a law professor at the Université de Montréal — the theory of the law had always appealed more to him than its practice — a critic of Pearson's decision to allow American nuclear-armed Bomarc missiles to be deployed in Canada, and politically aligned with the social democratic aspirations of the New Democratic Party. Far too much of a pragmatist to settle for moral rather than electoral power, Trudeau decided that if he was going to enter politics, he wanted to run for the Liberals, a party with a likelihood of governing the country. After winning his seat, he served as parliamentary secretary to the prime minister and was appointed minister of justice a little more than a year later.

He excelled in the role. Late in December 1967, at the end of an exuberant, self-confident centennial year, he introduced two pivotal pieces of legislation to bring the antiquated divorce laws and the stringent Criminal Code in line with the behaviours and attitudes of a younger generation of Canadians, even if the changes contravened religious codes and mores. The omnibus amendments to the Criminal Code, which proposed legalizing contraception and decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults, provided Trudeau with one of his most celebrated quotes — albeit lifted from an editorial in the
Globe and Mail
— that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Enshrining individual rights and personal freedom was one of his core beliefs and would become a hallmark of his political career and his legacy. He showcased another political and philosophical tenet — a strong federal government surmounting its constituent provinces and territories — at a televised federal-provincial conference on constitutional affairs in Ottawa in February 1968. Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson had been elected premier of Quebec in 1966 after a campaign of “
égalité ou indépendance
,”
and he brought that mandate and the idea of a new kind of federalism — based on the notion of two equal nations: Quebec and the rest of Canada — to the conference.

Trudeau eviscerated the argument coolly but with merciless logic, and humiliated the man on national television. “His tone ever more biting, his voice metallic, Trudeau responded to Johnson's reference to him as the ‘député de Mont-Royal' by describing the premier as the ‘député de Bagot'” (his provincial riding in the Eastern Townships of Quebec), as John English relates in
Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau
. At a coffee break hastily called by Pearson to allow the tension to dissipate, Trudeau “curtly nodded at Johnson and muttered that the premier was seeking to destroy the federal government. Johnson sneered that Trudeau was acting like a candidate, not a federal minister.” Here was an early example of the lone combatant in action, yet another side of the dashing, eloquent bachelor who sported a rose in his lapel, wore a leather coat, and drove a silver Mercedes 300SL convertible.

A little more than a week later, Trudeau announced that he would be entering the leadership race to succeed Pearson as party leader and prime minister at the Liberal convention in April 1968. He had agonized over the decision to run and he didn't win the contest easily — it took four ballots. But in the wider world, the one reached by television, he was already generating emotional crushes normally reserved for rock stars.

From the beginning he envisaged a goal far beyond the mundane pragmatism of party politics. “By building a truly just society,” he promised dubious Liberals, “this beautiful, rich and energetic country of ours can become a model in which every citizen will enjoy his fundamental rights, in which two great linguistic communities and people of many cultures will live in harmony and in which each individual will find fulfillment.” He was sworn in as prime minister on April 20. Three days later he asked the governor general to dissolve Parliament and call an election for June 25, 1968.

The swarming that had begun even before the leadership convention became known as Trudeaumania. Partly it was timing. Trudeau emerged on the federal political scene just as the swaggering postwar baby-boom generation, the first to be reared on television, got the vote. Trudeau's taut, sculpted face with his glittering eyes and implacable stare was ideal for television. As media guru Marshall McLuhan, a friend, pointed out, he had “the perfect mask — a charismatic mask . . . the face of a North American Indian.”

His appearance, his mannerisms, his eligibility, his ambiguities, and his dangerous flair lured boomers like moths to his charismatic flame. Communications theorist Don Tapscott suggested in an interview that baby boomers, who had grown up with television, looked to the box to find leaders they could follow. By that reasoning, Trudeau — “the command and control, top down, great visionary” — was the quintessential man of his time. “We were passive recipients in a one-way, one size fits all, one-to-many medium, where the messages could be architected and controlled,” said Tapscott, identifying himself as a boomer. “It was about the powerful central authority pushing something out to passive recipients. Trudeau, with his gunslinger mode, was a great master of that.”

At times, especially in the middle of his long political career, Trudeau's connection with Canadians attenuated into Trudeauphobia as his economic policies failed to ameliorate the recession driven by the
OPEC
oil embargo in the mid-1970s, or when the West bristled about the forced sharing of gushing oil revenues under the National Energy Program in the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, with the first sovereignty referendum defeated, the constitution patriated, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined, he seemed to lose interest in Canadians and politics, and they with him, as the deficit soared close to $40 billion and interest rates spiralled. As economist Sylvia Ostry told
Maclean's
after Trudeau's death, “He was highly intelligent and intellectual: he read all of his briefing documents, including the footnotes. He just wasn't interested in economics. He listened to everything and understood it. But in the end, he had one priority: national unity.”

He wanted an international platform for his final crusade: a world without nuclear arms. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but the momentum fizzled, largely because of the opposition of those dogged Cold Warriors Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Ronald Reagan of the United States. But the link with Canadians was never severed, even after he left office on June 30, 1984, moved back to Montreal with his three sons, and joined the law firm Heenan Blaikie.

Most of us who lived through those years, and even those who were too young to be startled by a Canadian prime minister pirouetting saucily behind the Queen's back at a Buckingham Palace reception, impressed by his dignity in dealing with his flamboyantly rebellious wife, or shocked by reports of him giving the finger to protesters at a B.C. whistle stop in what came to be called the “Salmon Arm salute,” carry contrary images of Trudeau in our heads. Here are five evocative moments from his life.

The Defiant Prime Minister

THE 1960S WERE
tumultuous times, no more so than in 1968. In France, students were marching through the streets of Paris; in the United States the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart, especially after the military launched the Tet Offensive in January and civil rights leader Martin Luther King was murdered in April and Senator Robert Kennedy in June. Canadians watching TV reports of rioting and looting south of the border knew they weren't immune. Quebec separatists had been blowing up mailboxes and delivering package bombs for years in their terrorist campaign to secede from the rest of Canada, a movement that would gain political strength and credibility in 1968 with the formation of the Parti Québécois.

Trudeau confronted the fear of politically motivated violence when he insisted on appearing at the annual Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade on the eve of the federal election he had called for June 25, 1968. Trudeaumania had swept much of the country, but in Quebec he was hated by many for his pro-federalist stand, a situation he had inflamed with his belligerent and uncompromising remarks. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau advised him to stay away from the parade and so did others, but he refused. Trudeau, along with other dignitaries, including Mayor Drapeau and the archbishop of Montreal, Paul Grégoire, sat on a reviewing stand on Sherbrooke Street across from Lafontaine Park. A group of hardcore separatists led by Pierre Bourgault of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale (
RIN
) started heaving bottles and shouting, “
Trudeau
au poteau
” (Trudeau to the stake). More than forty police and eighty civilians were injured and nearly three hundred rioters arrested.

Several dignitaries fled and two
RCMP
officers threw their coats over Trudeau and tried to force him to the floor of the reviewing stand. He shook them off and sat upright, staring defiantly at the protesters, his eyes flashing as he sent an unmistakeably tough message to voters across the country watching the late-night news. Here was a politician willing to stand up to the separatists. By the time the ballots were counted the next evening, he and the Liberals had won a majority government, the first since Louis St. Laurent's victory in 1953 and John Diefenbaker's landslide triumph for the Progressive Conservatives in 1958.

If Trudeau's performance on the reviewing stand made a difference in the outcome, his message was heard loudest in Quebec (56 seats), Ontario (63 seats), and, surprisingly, in British Columbia (16 seats). It was the first of five federal elections that Trudeau fought in his nearly two decades in public office. He won four of them.

The Bellicose Prime Minister

EVEN BEFORE TRUDEAU
went to Ottawa, small and disparate incendiary groups, inspired by revolutionary movements in Algeria, Cuba, and other despotic states, had been terrorizing the citizenry under the guise of freedom fighting. Their specialties were Molotov cocktails, bomb blasts in mailboxes, vandalism to monuments of Anglo heroes, and infiltration into labour disputes in foreign-owned factories. In the spring of 1963, a war veteran on the eve of his pension was killed and an explosives expert maimed as he tried to defuse a bomb in a Westmount mailbox. Early in 1969, bombs ripped through the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring close to thirty people.