Working the Dead Beat (8 page)

Then, on October 5, 1970, a Front de libération du Québec cell kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross at his Redpath Crescent mansion on the southern slopes of Mount Royal, issued a manifesto urging the people of Quebec to rise up against their oppressors, and demanded concessions for Cross's release, including freedom for twenty-three “political prisoners,” $500,000 in gold, and broadcast and publication of the
FLQ
manifesto.

Trudeau refused to negotiate, although the manifesto was read in French and English on radio and television. Police raids on suspected troublemakers began on the morning of October 7. Two days later, on Saturday afternoon of the Thanksgiving weekend, another
FLQ
cell abducted Quebec labour minister, Pierre Laporte, while he was playing touch football in a field across from his home in Saint-Lambert, Quebec. The following day, under coercion from his kidnappers, Laporte sent a “
Mon cher Robert
” letter to Premier Bourassa, begging for his life. At Quebec's request, Trudeau sent in the army to patrol the streets in the search for Cross and Laporte, transforming Montreal from the hippest city in Canada into a film set for a war movie. He also ordered the military to patrol significant sites in Ottawa.

Then, as Trudeau was bounding up the steps on the way to his office in the Parliament Buildings on the morning of October 13, he encountered a covey of journalists with microphones, tape recorders, and television cameras. One of them,
CBC
reporter Tim Ralfe, scrummed him about the trade-off between armed security forces in the streets and the potential risk that prominent people might be kidnapped. The debate went back and forth with Trudeau the civil libertarian — but also the prime minister charged with maintaining “peace, order, and good government” — arguing that it was “more important to get rid of those who are committing violence against the total society and those who are trying to run the government through a parallel power by establishing their authority by kidnapping and blackmail.”

Ralfe refused to concede his larger philosophical point about what risks are reasonable in order to live in a
democratic society. That's when Trudeau lost his patience.
Hands on hips, his nostrils flaring, he shifted into attack mode and snarled, “There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of a soldier's helmet.”

Other leaders might have walked away from the cameras. Trudeau, ever competitive, continued to joust verbally with the reporter. Ralfe, no doubt sensing the terrific sound bite he had for the evening news, pushed for more: “At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?” To which Trudeau snapped his famous riposte, “Well, just watch me.”

In fact, we couldn't watch him, because the decision about what to do next was taken behind closed doors. Cabinet documents and books released by researchers who have had access to Trudeau's papers all indicate that the decision to impose the War Measures Act, last invoked after Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939, was not a unilateral move by the prime minister but the result of ongoing discussions and consultations, over most of a week, with his own Cabinet, the government of Quebec, and the municipality of Montreal.

Early in the morning of October 16, after formal requests from Quebec and Montreal, the federal government imposed the War Measures Act, giving the state extraordinary and draconian authority to suspend civil liberties and arrest and hold people without charge and without access to legal counsel. Within forty-eight hours the police had reportedly carried out more than 1,500 raids. More than 250 people were arrested, including the singer Pauline Julien, the poet Gérald Godin, and the journalist Nick Auf der Maur. By the end of the year, the total arrested had risen to 468, of whom 408 were released without charges being laid.

Later that same morning, Trudeau announced in the House of Commons that the government had imposed the War Measures Act; he made a televised address that evening to the nation — one of the few times when he read from a script. The following night, Laporte's body was found at Saint-Hubert Airport in the trunk of a car belonging to Paul Rose, one of the kidnappers. He had been strangled with the gold chain carrying a small crucifix that he wore around his neck.

Many believed he had been murdered in retaliation for the War Measures Act. Margaret Sinclair, who was secretly dating Trudeau, wrote later in her tell-all memoir
Beyond Reason
that she had been in bed with him at Harrington Lake when the phone rang at one a.m. with the news that Laporte's body had been found. She heard him crying after he put the phone down. “I watched him grow old before my eyes. It was as if Laporte's death lay on his shoulders alone: he was the one who wouldn't negotiate, and he was the man who would now have to take responsibility for the murder of an innocent man.”

At the time there was widespread approval of the government's action. As an indication of the prevailing mood, reporter Tim Ralfe was formally and publicly reprimanded for his aggressive questioning of the prime minister, and a letter was placed in his file by
CBC
executive news producer Peter Trueman — actions the broadcast executive later regretted.

The bill passed 190 to 16 in the House of Commons, with the only concerted opposition coming from Tommy Douglas and most of his
NDP
caucus. When Douglas suggested that the prime minister was using a sledgehammer to smash a peanut, Trudeau replied that “peanuts don't make bombs, don't take hostages, and don't assassinate prisoners. And as for the sledgehammer, it was the only tool at our disposal.”

Whatever people said later — and many did renounce the War Measures Act, including some of those sitting around the Cabinet table — polls taken at the time showed overwhelming support for the actions taken by the federal government. Indeed, both Douglas and René Lévesque, who had also opposed the War Measures Act, were pilloried, and Lévesque, who had founded the Parti Québécois two years earlier, failed to win a seat in the 1973 provincial election.

As for Trudeau, he never changed his mind about negotiating with terrorists and never conceded that there was a link between the “six kids trying to make a revolution,” as James Cross labelled his kidnappers, and Trudeau himself as a vocal revolutionary in the 1940s. Of course, Trudeau never acted out his ultra-nationalist agenda and never resorted to violence like the
FLQ
cell members who murdered Laporte. There can be no doubt, however, that Trudeau destroyed violence as a tactic for sovereignty. After the October Crisis, the struggle for independence was fought with words and arguments, not bombs and abductions.

The Prime Minister Takes a Wife

“TRUDEAU MARRIES VANCOUVER
Girl, 22” blared the headline in large type on the front page of the
Globe and Mail
on March 5, 1971. Below it was a photograph of the prime minister boogying with Margaret Sinclair, one of the five daughters of Lester Pearson's former fisheries minister, James Sinclair. The headline, along with the picture, which had been taken during their first public date in 1969, at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, conveyed the bewildered tone of editorialists and readers. What will he do next? was the rhetorical question. The best reaction came from former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, when he suggested that Trudeau had had two choices: marry Sinclair or adopt her.

Pictures of the wedding, which had taken place the evening before, followed, with the dark-haired bride wearing a hooded caftan that she had made herself during a course put on by the Singer sewing machine company. The pair had met in Tahiti the Christmas of 1967, when she was nineteen and he was deciding whether to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party. Before they married, she converted to Roman Catholicism. She bore him two sons, Justin and Alexandre (Sacha), on Christmas Day two years apart, in 1971 and 1973, which somehow made the union both more improbable and yet somehow preordained by a higher order. Michel completed the trio with his birth on October 2, 1975.

Isolated and alienated in Ottawa, where she had few friends, trapped by the protocols and security regulations attendant on the wife of the prime minister, exhausted by the demands of three small children, Margaret Trudeau was bored, lonely, and feeling ignored by a husband who was away all day and worked long into the night on what she later called those “damned brown boxes.” In one of their fights she ripped out the hand-stitched letters in
La raison avant la passion
, the prized French version of artist Joyce Wieland's famous quilt, which he had bought and hung on a wall at 24 Sussex.

The public was curious about this flower child with the hedonistic past, and Trudeau and his advisors found a way to slake its thirst: showcasing his young wife on the campaign trail in the 1974 election. “In 1972, my campaign never really got off the ground,” he told reporters, “but this year, I've found the secret. I have a train, and I have Margaret.” She travelled with him and introduced him to huge crowds, once going so far as to say at a rally in Vancouver: “He's a beautiful guy. He taught me a lot about loving.” Afterwards, she said she had felt “used.”

In following his heart, Trudeau had married a naive and narcissistic — she would later be diagnosed as bipolar — young woman less than half his age. For a time it seemed that the dashing (and ageing) bachelor had found a way to harness the beauty and energy of the baby-boom generation, but marriage wasn't an affair, it was a lifelong commitment. She was certainly not ready for that, and he wasn't willing to give up his day job.

After humiliating him with obscene outbursts at diplomatic functions, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in Toronto, dancing lewdly and drunkenly at Studio 54 and other New York discos, and having affairs with, among others, Senator Ted Kennedy, Margaret Trudeau finally fled. The couple separated in 1977 and divorced in 1984. He never complained publicly about his rebellious wife, expressing compassion for her in interviews, but he drove a hard bargain: he got sole custody of their three sons and she got little if any alimony. “I'll win in the end,” she told him, “because I'm going to live longer. When the boys are grown up, I'll still be around.” Little did she realize that she would ultimately need them to keep her life in order and that his legacy would grow with time.

He never remarried, although in May 1991, when he was in his early seventies, he had a daughter, Sarah, by lawyer Deborah Coyne, a constitutional advisor to then Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells.

The Prime Minister as Architect of Modern Canada

IN 1973, TRUDEAU
said on the
CTV
program
W5
that he had entered politics for two reasons: “to make sure that Quebec wouldn't leave Canada through separatism” and “to make sure that Canada wouldn't shove Quebec out through narrow-mindedness.” In a way he tried to remake Canada in his own image — bilingual, rational, and confident of its rights and responsibilities — and he succeeded perhaps better than he could have imagined. Those goals underlie official bilingualism, the push to promote francophones in the civil service, the Charter, his vision of a strong federalism, and his obsession with patriating the Constitution, which more than a century after Confederation remained an act of the British Parliament that could be amended only by sending a request to Westminster.

Several prime ministers before Trudeau had tried to wrest the British North America Act from Britain but had always failed to come up with an amending formula that all ten provinces and the federal government could accept. He first tried to make constitutional change at the federal-provincial conference in Victoria in 1971, with a proposal to patriate the constitution with an amending formula, entrench French and English as official languages, and codify rights such as freedom of expression and religion.

All the provinces agreed, and then Robert Bourassa got chilblains after he returned home and was pilloried by politicial allies and opponents for giving away too much. He called Trudeau, reneged on the verbal agreement, and so the proposal foundered. Trudeau blamed the electoral victory of the Parti Québécois five years later and Brian Mulroney's Meech Lake Accord in the late 1980s on Bourassa, because the Quebec premier had denied his province an opportunity to sign on to a constitutional accord when he had the chance. “Much of Bourassa's subsequent career,” Trudeau wrote in his
Memoirs
, “has been spent trying to regain what he was once so unwise as to refuse.”

After the Liberals were defeated by Joe Clark's Progressive Conservatives in the May 1979 election, Trudeau announced that he was retiring from politics. Quebec premier René Lévesque, leader of the separatist Parti Québécois, who had campaigned on offering Quebeckers a referendum on separation, thought he would have an easier time winning it with Trudeau out of power and sped up his agenda.

Fate intervened. The minority Clark government was defeated on a budget amendment in December 1979, only seven months after taking office, and Trudeau came roaring out of retirement — a convention had not yet been held to choose his successor — to lead the Liberals into the subsequent election. “Welcome to the 1980s,” Trudeau quipped on election night, February 18, 1980, having trounced Clark's Progressive Conservatives 147 seats to 103, although his majority mandate was lopsided, with no seats west of Manitoba, in contrast with the distribution in the 1968 election.

An emboldened Trudeau, knowing this mandate would probably be his last, focused on the issues that mattered most to him and that in the end guaranteed his legacy. First among them was the referendum, and that led to ferocious public confrontations between Trudeau and Lévesque over the future of the country.