OPEN EYE - November 2000
VC's Column
Two nation-building statesmen
We have lost two notable statesmen. Scotland mourns its First Minister, Donald Dewar, who created the Scottish Parliament. Canada grieves for Pierre Trudeau, who was Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984. Did Donald Dewar and Pierre Trudeau ever meet? They shared many common ideals.
Dewar guided Scotland to a new constitutional arrangement that will lead to a more federal structure for the UK. Trudeau inherited a mature federal structure and faced nationalistic forces in Quebec that wanted to break it up. His answer was to patriate Canada’s constitution and to embed bilingualism and a Charter of Rights within it.
I met each of these men only once. Donald Dewar was a fellow guest at the Canadian High Commission in London in 1998. Knowing him previously only for his dour and direct television style I was surprised to discover his lively sense of humour and broad interests.
In 1987 Pierre Trudeau was the guest of honour at an opulent dinner at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to mark the entry (ill-fated as it turned out) of Canadian businessman Robert Campeau into the American retail market. I had to give a short speech and Trudeau fixed me with an encouraging look from his piercing blue eyes as I addressed the group.
Having travelled to London for Churchill’s funeral in 1965 I regretted being unable to be in Montreal for Trudeau’s funeral. Both events symbolised the end of an era. I lived in Canada for all but the first of Trudeau’s years as Prime Minister and became a fervent admirer of him.
Why was this? What was it about Pierre Elliott Trudeau that left such an impression? Like everyone else I enjoyed his style and his originality. I admired his determination. Although small and frail as a youth he developed impressive physical prowess as a diver, skier and canoeist. This became part of his originality as when, walking through a hotel in China with an economist on one side and an interpreter on the other, he made a perfect somersault and continued talking as if nothing had happened.
He was also an outstanding orator. Not for Trudeau the teleprompter and the podium. He would stand at the front of the stage, thumbs in belt in his gunslinger stance, moving effortlessly between French and English and relishing the chance to rebut hecklers.
But above all I admired Trudeau as an intellectual who, more than any politician of his generation, had thought through his position on the key issue of politics - namely the balance that a democracy has to maintain between individual rights and freedoms and the common good.
He had developed his position over many years, first as a student in Montreal, at Harvard, at the LSE and in Paris, then as a law professor and campaigner for workers’ rights in Quebec in the post-war period. He became Prime Minister of Canada in 1968 only three years after being elected to Parliament for the first time. In 1969 he invoked the War Measures Act when the Quebec Liberation Front kidnapped a diplomat and murdered a cabinet minister. Some civil libertarians were outraged but Trudeau argued that the state had a duty to defend its democratic processes.
The irony of this controversy was that Trudeau was unbending in his defence of the rights of the individual over those of the state. Dismissive of the notion of ‘collective rights’, whether of majorities or minorities, he insisted on the constitutional equality of all citizens. This was the battleground on which he fought the separatist movement in Quebec and his motivation for enshrining a Charter of Rights in the constitution when he patriated it from Britain in 1982.
This is also the link between the legacies of Dewar and Trudeau. Pierre Trudeau held that federalism gives better government and greater freedoms to the individual than does a unitary state. Thanks to Donald Dewar the UK has taken its first tentative step toward federalism. However, we have done so without yet paying due attention to preserving the constitutional equality of all citizens.
This will become an issue sooner or later - as will the rise of various nationalisms within the UK. Let us hope that when these issues come to a head our country will have a leader with Pierre Trudeau’s willpower and lucidity.