It was easy to forget that most Canadians in the 1960s and 1970s stayed married, wanted children, decried the drug culture, and, for that matter, never voted for Pierre Elliott Trudeau. American draft dodgers in Canada were far outnumbered by the young Canadians who joined the U. S. forces to fight in Vietnam. Liberated lifestyles were more visible in downtown Vancouver or Montreal than in Kamloops, Kirkland Lake, or Medicine Hat—or even in Burnaby, Mississauga, or Laval. As usual, the fashions that defined an age were set by the urban middle class. People who wore blue jeans because they were cheap, not chic, followed styles more slowly and sometimes not at all.
Television and the new recording technologies kept people in touch with images of change, but they could not always transcend actual experience. Outside the boutique culture of the big cities, plenty of Canadians did not believe that prosperity was permanent or even that it included them. There had been no economic take-off in Atlantic Canada or in the small-town hinterland of Quebec. Prairie farmers ended the booming 1960s with falling prices, a new wheat glut, and their ineradicable memories of the Great Depression. Mining communities from Pine Point, Northwest Territories, to Buchans, Newfoundland, knew that world prices or a new technology could wipe them off the map.
Trudeau took power in 1968 to tackle the great French-English dialogue; he needed time to discover that there were many other divisions in Canada. At forty-nine, Trudeau was not Canada’s youngest prime minister, but politically he was one of the least experienced. He ran his Cabinet as an academic seminar, built his staff as a buffer against political pressures, and set out to govern Canada on philosophical first principles. Economics and administration interested him little. Jean Mar-chand, in a new Department of Regional Economic Expansion, could spend what he liked to end old disparities. Eric Kierans, the radical former president of the Montreal Stock Exchange, was free to automate the post office. Eugene Whalen could
Left; John Polanyi, professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto, won Canada’s fourth Nobel Prize, in 1986, for his contri-fascinate or infuriate farmers with his marketing butions concerning the dynamics of boards and subsidy schemes. The tax reforms that chemical processes—specifically, his
Above; In 1971 Gerhard Herzberg, one of the few Jewish refugees from Hitler admitted by Canada in the 1930s, became the country’s third Nobel laureate for his work in molecular spectroscopy.
Might have helped fulfil Trudeau’s pledge of a “Just work on chemical laser technology. Society” were savaged and convoluted by Edgar Benson, the finance minister, until they chiefly enriched millionaires and chartered accountants. These were not the Prime Minister’s concerns.
Nor, on the whole, was he preocupied by Canada’s place in the world. Vietnam and the new strategic doctrines of mutually assured destruction (mad for short) had cooled the nuclear fears of the early 1960s. Like the ndp, whose cause he had briefly espoused, Trudeau believed in disarmament and disengagement. Canada’s armed forces, painfully unified in 1968 by Paul Hellyer, Pearson’s defence minister, found that their hated new green uniforms were only the beginning of humiliation. In 1969, Canada’s NATO contingent was cut in half and the armed forces’ strength was chopped by a third. NATO al-
While Lester Pearson looks sombrely statesmanlike, Pierre Trudeau makes little attempt to hide a smile, as Quebec presents its usual non-negotiable demands to the 1968 federal-provincial conference. Trudeau’s televised performance, standing up to fellow Quebecers, helped make him prime minister only weeks later.
Lies were not pleased. Nor were diplomats in the Department of External Affairs when Trudeau, claiming that he could learn all that he needed to know from the New York Times, closed some overseas missions.
One issue that Trudeau did understand and that gripped his attention was Quebec’s role in Canada. Brilliantly bilingual and utterly self-confident, Trudeau urged young Quebecers to abandon the “ancestral wigwam” and join him in dominating the country which their voyageur ancestors had helped create. Unlike Laurier and St. Laurent, who had carefully surrounded themselves with enough English-speaking ministers and advisers to reassure the majority, Trudeau promoted any Quebecers who matched his intellect and flair. The Official Languages Act, establishing the equality of French and English and making the central government and its agencies effectively bilingual, was the cornerstone of Trudeau’s first term. With the exception of John Diefenbaker and a few Tory loyalists, Parliament gave its ungrudging consent.
Trudeau had done nothing that he had not urged eloquently and in both languages during his 1968 campaign. Bilingualism would be the basis for a fundamental equality of citizenship. Special status for any province, group, or individual struck Trudeau
As undemocratic. Having heard Native people denounce the Indian Act as an engine of oppression, he was astonished when its abolition and the consequent removal of a special status for Native people was denounced as genocide by the same people, lean Chretien, the ebullient young minister responsible, promptly reversed himself. The Natives won: the Indian Act survived.
Canadians might have been more hospitable to Trudeau’s recipe for national unity if they had better understood the Canada-Quebec crisis and if their prime minister had shown equal sensitivity to other regional concerns. “Why should I sell your wheat?” Trudeau demanded of angry western farmers. The Wheat Board was, of course, a major federal agency. Grain growers would remember their prime minister’s arrogant forgetfulness. Nor did Trudeau seem very sensitive to the economic chill that ended the soaring sixties. As early as 1966, inflation began to tarnish prosperity. From 1961 to 1965, the consumer price index had risen about 5 per cent; in the balance of the decade, it climbed 17 points. Since industrial wages climbed twice as fast, economists found an easy scapegoat: greedy unions, especially in the public sector. One of the last reforms of the Pearson era had been to grant the right to strike to many federal employees. Government workers had certainly done their best to improve their lagging wages. Inflation had other sources, too, from the high cost of Expo ’67 to Washington’s determination to finance its Vietnam War with borrowed money. Whatever the causes, inflation hurt. So did the tight-money cure promptly administered by the Bank of Canada. A stylish, sophisticated prime minister was as obvious a scapegoat as he had once been a hero.
The West got angry first. In 1968, Trudeau had carried a majority of the seats west of Lake Superior. That would not happen again. Instead of selling wheat, Ottawa told prairie farmers to cut their acreages. Those who obeyed suffered most when Soviet and Chinese crop failures sent world demand and prices soaring. Provincial Liberals paid the price. A year after Trudeau’s victory, a cautious, multilingual Ed Schreyer led the NDP to victory in Manitoba against an anti-Quebec, anti-Ottawa Tory. Next door, Ross Thatcher’s Liberals had beaten the weary Saskatchewan ccf in 1964, after the country’s lone social-democratic government had won a bruising fight for Canada’s first Medicare scheme. By 1971, any kind of prairie Liberal was in trouble. That year, Allan Blakeney of the ndp had his vengeance on Ross Thatcher’s regime. A year later, Dave Barrett gleefully led his “socialist hordes” to power in British Columbia. In every case, defecting Liberal voters made up the ndp’s winning margin, and the Trudeau government deserved at least some of the blame. In Alberta, there was no great ideological shift in 1971 when Peter Lougheed’s Conservatives crushed the thirty-six-year-old So-
After Hawker Siddeley, the latest owner of Sydney’s aged steelmill, announced its shutdown, Cape Breton sent Ottawa a sadly familiar message. The government’s response to regional disparity and economic decline was subsidy, public ownership, and forced optimism.
Cial Credit regime, but Alberta’s Liberals almost vanished. Ottawa would soon feel the change.
Atlantic Canada, more cautious and far more dependent on Ottawa’s redistributed largesse, was more restrained in its resentment. In the vacuum left by Robert Stanfield’s departure, Nova Scotia narrowly elected the Liberals in 1970, but New Brunswick chose Richard Hatfield to lead the first Tory government ever backed by the province’s powerful Acadian minority. A year later, Joey Smallwood’s hubris as well as his Trudeau ties allowed the Newfoundland Conservatives first a narrow and then a sweeping triumph, their first on the Rock since the 1920s.
Political upheaval in both the West and the East left Trudeau and his advisers unmoved. Alternation of identical governments with different labels was a norm in the Maritimes; the three ndp regimes were sufficiently embattled with corporate and conservative enemies to cause Ottawa no problem. Post-war population growth in the central provinces had only reinforced the fact that any party that held Quebec and much of Ontario would rule Canada. Prosperity and a capacity for opportune reform may have made Ontario Tories unbeatable, but the federal Liberals co-existed comfortably, taking credit for the 1965 Auto Pact and claiming the allegiance of continuing waves of immigrants. Ontario’s wealth fostered economic nationalism among academic elites.
But few wanted to condemn a deal that spread dozens of auto-parts plants and thousands of jobs across the cities and towns of southwestern Ontario.
Quebec was another matter. In the balance of “have” and “have-not” provinces, Quebec was perched in the middle, a mixture of Ontario-style urban growth and the decrepit, subsidized industries and regional unemployment characteristic of the Mar-itimes. Daniel Johnson’s political skUl and nationalist grandstanding had forged a narrow victory in 1966, but his sudden death and a decent but colourless successor, Jean-Jacques Bertrand, left the Union Nationale floundering. By 1969, Rene Levesque had inspired and bullied the separatists into a single Parti Quebecois (pq). Bertrand’s fumbling and evidence from the Laurendeau-Dunton Royal Commission gave the new party an issue. Like Toronto, Montreal had been flooded by hundreds of thousands of hard-working immigrants from southern Europe; as in Toronto, most of them sent their children to English-speaking schools in a sensible recognition of which language actually dominated the local economy. Laurendeau-Dunton statistics only confirmed
Native children in Mistassini, in northern Quebec, use skipping rhymes that might be heard anywhere in Canada. In the 1970s Canadians began to realize what a bleak future the young people in northern communities were facing.
Quebecois suspicions. While the English were top earners, the newcomers’ average earnings surpassed those of even bilingual French Canadians. A post-Expo recession fuelled resentment and fed crowds into language riots in the predominantly Italian suburb of St-Leonard. Shocked by the threat to Quebec’s traditional linguistic and educational pluralism, Bertrand temporized. Only Levesque and the pq could profit from an issue that threatened not only Quebec’s cultural traditions but Trudeau’s push for nationwide bilingualism.
The language question posed a real problem for Quebec Liberals. They commanded the near-total allegiance of the province’s English minority, but obviously they needed many more votes to win. Robert Bourassa, the youthful technocrat who now led Quebec’s Liberals, chose to outflank the issue. Backed by Trudeau and his own credentials as an economist, Bourassa launched his 1970 campaign by promising a hundred thousand new jobs. Confederation, he proclaimed, would be made profitable. To most Quebecers, anxious about their own jobs and fed up with a succession of riots, demonstrations, and violent strikes, Bourassa’s message was welcome. The Union Nationale vote split among competing Social Credit and Parti Quebecois candidates. On April 29, 1970, Liberals won 72 of the 108 National Assembly seats. The pq won only 7 constituencies.
The victory was no prize. Quebec was deep in debt. Only subsidies and tariffs kept many local industries in business. Thousands of graduates demanded the kind of jobs a university degree had once promised. Quebec teachers now espoused Marxism with an ardour they had once reserved for Catholicism. A succession of Montreal street riots seemed a herald of revolution. When Mayor lean Drapeau warned of terrorism, opinion leaders sneered that he was merely trading on alarmism for his own re-election.
On October 5,1970, James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, was kidnapped. Among the kidnappers’ demands was the broadcast of a manifesto from the Front de Liberation du Quebec (flq), a romantic revolutionary movement with a terrorist core. The Bourassa government nervously agreed. Mass rallies of nationalist students shouted their contempt for the young government and their allegiance to the FLQ. On October 10, Pierre Laporte, Bourassa’s Minister of Labour, was seized from his front lawn as his family watched. There were more mass rallies. Robert Lemieux, a self-proclaimed lawyer for the kidnappers, held court for the media at a downtown Montreal hotel. Rene Levesque, Claude Ryan of Le Devoir, and other eminent nationalists mustered to offer Bourassa their advice: don’t involve Ottawa. It was too late. The Premier had already asked Ottawa for help.
Auto workers enjoying a rest break, 1974. to the unionization of manufacturing, Canadian workers achieved a security and quality of working life that their ancestors could hardly have imagined.
Trudeau acted. Before dawn on October 16, he proclaimed the War
Measures Act. As armed soldiers fanned out to guard key public figures, local police rounded up 468 people. A day later, Laporte’s captors strangled him and left his body in the trunk of a car. The cheering was over. A search, slow and sometimes inept, finally located the British diplomat and Laporte’s kUlers. Those swept up in the police raids were released. Some were cases of mistaken identity; most had suffered brief imprisonment for the heady thrill of preaching revolution. They now wanted revenge. So did other Canadians who now seemed to resent Trudeau more than the terrorists.
The man elected as the embodiment of liberation had dissolved that image in October 1970. His reasons were utterly clear. The government, Trudeau insisted, had acted “to make clear to kidnappers and revolutionaries and assassins that in this country laws are made and changed by the elected representatives of all Canadians — not by a handful of self-selected dictators.” Most Quebecers and most Canadians agreed, but an articulate minority did not. Civil libertarians never forgave Trudeau for a blunt decisiveness that was at odds with the liberation era. Using the War Measures Act (wma) in a domestic crisis had created martyrs and an ugly precedent. It also ended the erosion of Robert Bourassa’s democratically elected government. Using the wma also dumped the cost of military intervention on Ottawa.
While the ndp and Robert Stanfield more cautiously deplored Trudeau’s assault on civU liberties, the “October Crisis” sent Liberal popularity soaring. Then, as other issues inevitably intruded, it sagged. Inflation kept climbing. So did unemployment. Ingenious schemes to target social programs to the poor and cancel family allowances produced outrage; universal programs now seemed too hot to touch. When the government pro-
Montreal’s traditional St-Jean-Baptiste Parade turned ugly in 1968, when nationalist demonstrators used the occasion to attack the Prime Minister. Trudeau remained impassive in the face of their violence, and won by a landslide in the election the following week.
This soldier and military helicopter reflect Ottawa’s reaction to the October Crisis of 1970. While the government’s imposition of the War Measures Act and its massive deployment of troops shocked some Canadians, most people approved.
Posed to transform unemployment insurance into a version of a guaranteed annual income, taxpayers bridled at the cost and alleged that armies of “welfare bums” abused the system. David Lewis, the ccf veteran who took over the ndp in 1971, raged instead at “corporate welfare bums,” whose billions in deferred tax dollars could have lightened the burden on lower-paid taxpayers. Most Canadians preferred to condemn their poorer
Neighbours and a government that subsidized them without putting them to work.
Trudeau floated serenely above this sea of troubles. In the fall of 1972, he offered voters little more than the slogan “The Land Is Strong.” The voters were not impressed. By October 30, the 1968 Liberal coalition had dissolved. Only Quebec, rural and working-class Ontario, and new Brunswick’s Acadians remained. In a House of 109 Liberals and 107 Tories, Lewis’s 31 New Democrats would decide the government. “The universe,” Trudeau reassured his anxious followers, “is unfolding as it should.”
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