Max and Monique Nemni, translated by William Johnson - Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944

Max and Monique Nemni, translated by William Johnson

Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd, 2006, pp. 343, paper, $Cn27.99 / $US20.95, ISBN 978-0-7710-6749-6

Ramsay Cook

The Teeth of Time: Remembering Pierre Elliot Trudeau

Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006, pp. xii + 224, hardback, $Cn29.95, ISBN 978-0-7735-3149-9

Pierre Elliot Trudeau died in September 2000, sixteen years after ceasing to be prime minister of Canada. He continues to fascinate Canadians and, indeed, he remains virtually their only twentieth-century prime minister generally remembered in the wider world. The two books reviewed here are very different, but in nice apposition. Both deal with the intellectual Trudeau, appropriate because Trudeau was above all a thinker, although no mere desiccated brain. The study by Max and Monique Nemni, translated from French, explores the early Trudeau mind through his revealing private papers. The second, by the distinguished English-Canadian historian Ramsay Cook, chronicles a friendship of shared ideas that spanned the later decades of his life ─ the period that Canadians still call the 'Trudeau years'.
Pierre Trudeau crashed into Canadian politics by accident. Facing a federal election in 1965, and needing fresh faces in Quebec, the federal Liberals sought to enlist the popular trade union leader, Jean Marchand. Marchand would not go to Ottawa without the reflective Gérard Pelletier, and Pelletier insisted on bringing along the playboy-socialist and law professor Trudeau. The Liberals gulped, but the loose cannon was soon a reforming Minister of Justice, with a constitutional philosophy which opposed concessions to his own province. When Lester Pearson retired in 1968, Canada's fractious bicultural partnership pointed to a federalist successor from Quebec, a role that Marchand and Pelletier persuaded Trudeau to take on. Thus, three years after sliding sideways into national politics, Pierre Trudeau became prime minister of Canada, a job that he retained, with one short break, for almost sixteen years.
By the time Canada was swept by 'Trudeaumania' in 1968, a disturbing clamour was coming out of Quebec. But English Canada had little comprehension of the internal turmoil behind the cacophony. A biographical construct of the formation of Trudeau helped make sense of events. Like most biographical constructs, it avoided outright inaccuracy but subtly distorted its emphases. For instance, Trudeau had not ridden into Ottawa as a complete outsider in 1965 but had worked as a federal civil servant from 1949 to 1951, an era when its Whitehall-West bureaucracy barely even attempted to understand French Canada.
The Trudeau biographical construct stressed his parentage: a millionaire French-Canadian father and an English-speaking mother gave him material advantages and an independent world view transcending the narrowness of clerical Quebec. The boy's education included a European tour that took him to Germany as the Nazis seized power, and intellectual schooling by the Jesuits at Montreal's elite Brébeuf College. Later he would study at Harvard and Paris and take classes with Laski at the London School of Economics. His defiance of the conservative-nationaliste regime of provincial premier Maurice Duplessis began with his support for strikers at the romantically named town of Asbestos, and led to his participation in the radical magazine, Cité Libre. The strike brought him into contact with Marchand; Cité Libre was Pelletier's project. Mainstream Quebec radicals despised Duplessis for claiming to defend French Canada while keeping its people in subjection. They argued for a left-leaning alternative strategy that would put the people first. Trudeau disagreed. Remembering Hitler's storm-troopers and his own maternal heritage, so the construct had it, Trudeau insisted that nationalism might start by sounding benign but you never knew where it would end. Hence in 1968 the new leader was not some wildcat wildcard but the man of destiny who had appeared at just the moment when Canada most needed him.
The original Cité Libre ceased publication in 1966. Max and Monique Nemni supported its revival in 1991 and came to know the now-retired Trudeau. In 1995, they secured his permission to write an intellectual biography, and he gave them access to his early personal papers ─ in effect, his class notes. The authors were shocked by what they found.
Pierre Trudeau, it transpired, had not always been a radical anti-nationalist. At Brébeuf he may have seemed offbeat ─ remember he was a moneyed teenager at an elite school ─ but intellectually he was deeply conformist. (Even as a graduate student at Harvard he sought formal permission from the Church to read banned books.) The extensive notes that he made on books he read, along with his articles for student magazines and sketches for satirical reviews, suggest that he took unpleasant ideas in his stride. Quebec society was shot through with anti-semitism, partly because Canada's most traditional province contained Montreal, the country's largest city, with its notable Jewish business community. Trudeau reflected this prejudice.
The second world war was a grey area in the Trudeau biographical construct, a distraction that this brilliantly aware young man somehow failed to notice. It was known that he had opposed conscription for overseas service. It is now clear that he went beyond isolationism to partisan admiration for Marshal Pétain. Defeated in 1940, France was rebuilding itself on its Catholic roots, just as Quebec had regrouped around the Church after the Conquest of 1759. It was a world view that equated the British empire with Hitler's Germany. Those Nazi jackboots had not made such an impression on the Montreal teenager after all.
At this point, two caveats seem appropriate, one biographical and the other methodological. The first pleads that we need not answer for the extreme views of early life. Comic sketches in which prison guards shout 'Heil Mackenzie King!' may be tasteless, but for most of us being young is not very heaven but downright embarrassing. Second, allowance should be made for Trudeau's intellectual formation. A Jesuit education is formidable because it trains students in the minute analysis, unlike the modern-day social sciences approach which yells 'fascist' and 'racist' each time it encounters an unfamiliar idea. Trudeau took detailed notes of arguments he encountered because that was the necessary preliminary either to reasoned refutation or informed concurrence. The fact that he transcribed some unpleasant theories does not in itself mean that he endorsed them.
But one episode clearly shows him as something more than the detached intellectual. By 1942, when he was 22, Trudeau was a committed separatist. Again, this is not entirely news: Trudeau had guardedly acknowledged his past replying to a parliamentary question in 1977, and it was rumoured that his name appeared on an RCMP list of subversives used to round up suspects during the October Crisis of 1970. He was not simply a member but probably the key theorist in a shadowy group called either 'X' or 'L.X' (curiously, the authors do not consider the possibility of 'Les X'). Its manifesto, which he helped to draft, called for an independent state (in those days, not 'Québec' but 'Laurentie') in which the people of 'la patrie' would be sovereign. The French and Catholic nature of this polity did not leave much room for Grace Elliott or Mordecai Richler. Surviving membership numbers (which may have been issued at random) suggest that several hundred people could have been involved. A few embarrassed reminiscences make it sound like the World Domination League of Peter Cook's sad satire. Its organisation was not so much cellular as paper-chain, with each member knowing only two others, one from whom he received orders and the other to whom he transmitted them. Potentially it was dangerous, and happily it fizzled out.
Young Trudeau is volume one of the planned intellectual biography. We shall probably discover that Trudeau's involvement with separatism resembled Tony Blair's fling with socialism, since he not only bought the T-shirt but became a fervently reformed sinner. All the same, the book closes, with Trudeau planning in 1944 to move on to Harvard, like an episode in a silent movie, with the hero bound to the nationalist track as the engine of modernity bears down upon him. It will need more than a bound to free Pierre in Volume Two.
Academic discourse in French tends to be more excitable than its English equivalent, and the authors certainly make remarkable revelations. Thanks to the excellent translation by William Johnson (himself a product of Brébeuf), the sense of challenge has made the transition without too much of the 'sacré bleu!' of Gallic astonishment. An index would have been useful.
The Teeth of Time is Ramsay's Cook account of what he calls an 'intellectual friendship' with Pierre Trudeau. He does not claim membership of the inner circle of life-sharers (all of whom, it seems, were from Quebec) but something more than an associate or acquaintance. Their friendship, which spanned forty years, was cerebral and it was also cyclical, with lengthy periods in which the Toronto-based professor and the orbiting Montreal-Ottawa comet saw little of one another.
A book about a friendship offers insights into two people, and this memoir cannot be understood independently of its author. Ramsay Cook is not simply one of Canada's most distinguished historians. He also belongs to that category with which British political culture remains uncomfortable, the public intellectual. Outsiders may find Cook's account of his conscience wrestling with New Democratic Party definitions of the constitutional status of Quebec reminiscent of Cardinal Newman explaining his theological beliefs, but Cook-on-Canada is itself a worthwhile study, and the more so as it tells us not only how the author became part of the Trudeau camp, but how he helped to ensure that the tents were erected at all. It is no denigration to liken an author's mental processes to those of Newman, and Cook himself urged Trudeau to model his own memoirs on the Apologia.
Cook's memoir is important because it illustrates just how small is a hyphen that links Canada's two founding peoples, even after decades of positive effort. Surely, if a country has to be bilingual, it could hardly make a better choice of official languages than English and French, which share so many features that they are almost two dialects of a common European speech? Yet the number of Canadians who fully comprehend the two cultures could probably be counted in hundreds, and maybe even handfuls. English is a sledgehammer tongue which often ignores nuances (a concept we had to borrow from French) of meaning. A classic example of a slovenly noun is 'nation': Nigeria is a nation, so is Wales. When, in the nineteen-sixties, Quebecers tried to conceptualise the country as 'deux nations', fellow citizens in the other nine provinces rushed to denounce the threat of Canada breaking into two sovereign states. Misunderstanding is magnified by the fact that French Canadians employ a universal language for their own minority discourse. Metropolitan France is about political power and cultural assertion; in Quebec, the priorities are adaptation and survival. (Even Ramsay Cook occasionally found Trudeau's prose hard to translate precisely.) School French may get you around Quebec but it will not get you inside Quebec. Even bilingual parentage is no guarantee of a bicultural personality: Trudeau himself played down his maternal heritage. Worse still, those happy few who possess real linguistic competence are not always blessed with concomitant skills of analysis. The most superbly bilingual Canadian I have ever met was a charming person who was unfortunately incapable of articulating a profound thought in either official language.
Hence the importance of Ramsay Cook. He was born in small-town Manitoba, the kind of place where people's views on language policy may be shaped by the belief that Jesus spoke English in the Bible. He went to university in Winnipeg. The city, it is true, is the only place in western city with a sizeable francophone community, but most Anglo-Winnipeggers manage to ignore St Boniface, and it is no disparagement of Franco-Manitobans to suggest that they do not speak the French of Molière. Remarkably, the student who did not set foot in eastern Canada until he was 20, became that precious but rare phenomenon, the interpreter of Quebec to English-speaking Canadians, through his translated anthology, French-Canadian Nationalism, and by frequent newspaper articles and energetic contributions to the conference circuit. It was there that he encountered the pre-political Trudeau, the Montreal professor who questioned the emerging nationalist agenda. They were very different personalities. Trudeau drove a Mercedes, Cook a second-hand Morris Minor (long ago, there were British cars on Canadian roads). Their intellectual friendship grew out of cerebral telepathy, a shared view of their country as both bicultural and united, which saw no contradiction between duality and strength.
English Canada's worthy quest to understand what Quebec tended to provide platforms for the most extreme demands. Cook fought to ensure that this francophone federalist voice was heard too. When, in 1968, Trudeau was pressed to run for the Liberal leadership, Cook is credited as one of a small group of Toronto-based counsellors who persuaded him that he could win outside his own province. It followed that he had to turn his back upon his prairie socialist roots (his heart was slow to follow) and join the Liberals himself. Anyone pondering the failure of Bolshevik revolution in Canada should note that the cash-poor New Democrats sportingly refunded his subscription.
The integrity of the relationship was probably supported by the fact that the two were not in constant contact during Trudeau's years in power. Like many thoughtful people, Cook was uneasy at the government's handling of the 1970 terrorist crisis although, having written a graduate thesis on civil liberties, he knew that there was no alternative to using the draconian War Measures Act. He hosted a private meeting at his Toronto home between Trudeau and some of his critics: the discussion was formal, frank but fruitless. The two continued to meet but collaborated in one only one further major campaign, against Brian Mulroney's 1987 attempt to declare Quebec a 'distinct society'.
Back in 1916, an organisation called Bonne Entente attempted to provide social space for French- and English-speaking Canadians to span the divisions caused by wartime pressures. It failed, and quickly, since each side regarded it as a platform for their own prejudices. Cook has written about the episode, and perhaps had it in mind in this chronicle. The Cook-Trudeau entente was long-lasting and based on shared ideas. Like all good relationships, it success depended on the observance of boundaries. With punctilious courtesy, Trudeau always enquired after Cook's family. With commendable tact, Cook never probed Trudeau's private life, even when Barbra Streisand seemed set to become Canada's proto-Carla Bruni. 'Friendship has one more than one meaning,' Cook sagely observes (p. 8) This friendship ran deep, and the memoir began as Cook's response to bereavement. As he says, he might simply have photocopied it for private circulation, but he was right to publish ─ not least for his acerbic asides and the witty self-deprecation with which he portrays an innocent academic skirting the real world of power. Believing himself to be too close for objectivity, Cook declined to become Trudeau's biographer, but it would be trite to categorise him as a mere Boswell.
Conventionally, explorations of Trudeau conclude by remarking that Canada's fifteenth prime minister remains an enigma. No doubt, but the real mystery enwraps the country that he led. How else could the footloose student who had once fantasised about destroying the federation become the iconic expression of political unity through cultural duality?