by Francis Carroll
St. John's College, University of Manitoba
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Robert Bothwell and J. L. Granatstein, Trudeau’s World: Insiders Reflect on Foreign Policy, Trade, and Defence, 1968–84. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017, 400 pages. ISBN 978-0-7748-3637-1, $45.00 (hardcover)
Robert Bothwell and J. L. (Jack) Granatstein are two outstanding Canadian historians. Bothwell, a Professor of History at the University
of Toronto and Director of the International Relations Program, is the author of many books on Canadian foreign relations and Cold War history. Granatstein is the Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at York University, Director of the Canadian War Museum, and a specialist in military history. In 1990, Bothwell and Granatstein collaborated on the writing of the book, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy, published by the University of Toronto Press. Much of that book was based on 180 interviews that the authors had with members of Trudeau’s governments, senior civil servants and diplomats, observers and diplomats from other countries, and finally from Trudeau himself. Because these interviews were held so close to the events discussed, the authors, in the name of confidentiality, did not record the conversations, but simply took notes and later wrote down fuller recollections of the matters raised. Copies of these interview notes have been placed in the Bothwell Papers at the University of Toronto and in the archives of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
Now, some thirty years after doing the research for Pirouette, Bothwell and Granatstein brought together a selection of about forty percent of these interviews organized under several topic headings in a new book called Trudeau’s World: Insiders Reflect on Foreign Policy, Trade, and Defence, 1968–84. It is tempting to think of this book as Pirouette, Volume II: The Documents, but that would diminish its importance and its value. These interviews— insiders’ observations and judgments—are endlessly fascinating and informative, and they are a very good read. They also give the reader a valuable glimpse of how the government works at the policy-making level and a fresh insight into that enigmatic figure in Canadian political life, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The book does three things very well: 1) It examines the complex and multi-layered workings of the government; 2) it focuses on and attempts to give clarity to several issues of the period that had foreign policy or military dimensions; and 3) it provides insider glimpses of that attractive but inscrutable figure, Trudeau.
Studies of government tend to be written based on official documents and memoirs of the major figures—the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence, the Minister of External Affairs. Bothwell and Granatstein’s interviews certainly include the observations and opinions of these key cabinet members in the Trudeau governments. What are particularly revealing, however, are the views from members of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office, such as R. Gordon Robertson, Michael Pitfield, and Ivan Head. The PMO and the PCO were the instruments through which Trudeau worked to shape policy. Of course, the departments—External Affairs and Defence—had ministers who were prominent members of the government, bringing a fresh vision to Canadian public life. However, these departments also had senior career civil servants, who had invested lifetime careers in articulating, implementing, and defending policies, which, under Trudeau, were now questioned and very likely reduced in budget or staffing. Personal rivalries both within and among departments also come out in the interviews. What is so fascinating is to read personal reflections about this multi-layered process and all of the pitfalls in the effort to re-direct the energies of the government. The book brings to life the complex process by which the ideas and wishes of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet are conveyed to the Ministries, to be drafted into workable policies that can then be put in action by the civil service staffs.
The tensions in this process can be seen dramatically in several of the ideas that Trudeau brought to the government when he became Prime Minister in 1968. Two leading examples are the Foreign Policy Review and the Canadian commitment to NATO. Members of External Affairs tended to look back on the late 1940s and 1950s as the “Golden Age” of diplomacy, when Canada was a founding member of the UN and NATO, inventor of the UN peacekeeping missions, and, in the person of Lester Pearson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. “No more helpful fixers,” was Trudeau’s early public statement about Canada’s foreign policy, and a direct slap at Pearson and his legacy (p. 6). ‘What was in it for Canada?’ Trudeau seemed to ask. Trudeau ordered a major Foreign Policy Review, which stirred great anxiety in the External Affairs staff. The result was the publication in 1970 of six pamphlets, “Foreign Policy for Canadians,” about aspects of Canadian foreign policy, which, while not particularly dramatic or innovative, made no mention of relations with the United States, ostensibly Canada’s most important foreign contact. That would come two years later, with Mitchell Sharp’s statement in 1972 that Canada had three choices in dealing with the United States: 1) It could maintain the status quo; 2) work for closer relations; or 3) pursue a “Third Option” of finding new markets and economic relations to make Canada less dependent on the United States (pp. 10 & 234).
Although the “Third Option” seemed the obvious choice when President Richard Nixon put a surcharge on all imports to the United States for about a year in 1971, little success was achieved in building markets that could replace those in the United States. Leading figures such as Thomas Enders, the US Ambassador to Canada, and Allan Gotlieb, the Canadian Ambassador to the US, were interviewed, but not Henry Kissinger, who seemed to have got along with Canadian officials surprisingly well. Trudeau’s concerns about defence policy also challenged the status quo. By the mid-1960s he questioned the purpose of NATO and regarded Canadian troops stationed in Germany with NATO as a failure to recognize from where threats to Canada might originate, as later demonstrated by the Quebec separatist movement. Against the advice of his Defence staff, Trudeau reduced the number of Canadian troops in Germany by fifty percent. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1970s, Trudeau approved the purchase of German tanks to keep Canadian troops equipped to support NATO forces.
A variety of civil servants were interviewed, along with one rear admiral and a general. The interviews illuminate the various parties to these efforts to deal with Trudeau’s wishes, maintain a certain stability and consistency to Canadian policy and adjust to Trudeau’s eventual lack of interest in many of these matters. Several of Trudeau’s attempts to lead Canada in a new direction did not go very far. He had quite cordial talks with the Russians, Alexei Kosygin actually visiting Canada, although Trudeau never returned the visit, and indeed relations with the SovietUnion declined by the end of the 1980s; Mikhail Gorbachev is identified fairly early in the 1980s as someone with whom it would be possible to work. Canadian Ambassadors to the Soviet Union, Robert Ford and Geoffrey Pearson were interviewed. Trudeau opened relations with China, which he had visited several times, but it would take many more years before there was much more contact. Canadian relations with France remained strained from 1967 with President Charles de Gaulle’s provocative statements in Quebec until the government of François Mitterrand in 1981.
Although the patriation of the Constitution is generally thought of as a domestic matter, getting its measures, including the amending formula and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, through the Parliament at Westminster was a major diplomatic effort for both the Canadian and British governments. Among those interviewed on these topics were Reeves Haggan, the former Solicitor-General, who was sent to London as the Government’s point man; Sir John Ford, the British High Commission in Ottawa (and not sympathetic); and the Rt. Hon. Lord Pym, sometime Foreign Secretary and government leader of the House of Commons. The last foreign affairs topic examined was Trudeau’s largely ineffectual peace initiative in the 1980s. Here again such Foreign Service professionals as Gotlieb and Pearson, among others, were interviewed.
Together with the interviewees, Bothwell and Granatstein have strong opinions about Trudeau. To be fair, they give him considerable credit for his domestic
policies—the bilingualism measures, the Quebec issues, the Charter of Rights, the patriation of the Constitution, and the National Energy Program. He certainly could win elections, serving as Prime Minister for over fifteen years, and being only the third Canadian Prime Minister to win re-election after being voted out of office earlier. Trudeau’s domestic policies are his legacy, they conclude, not his foreign and defence initiatives. They also seem vexed by his complex personality. Here indeed, they seem to express stronger opinions than they offered in 1990 in Pirouette. Foreign affairs and defence matters were perfect examples. Bothwell and Granatstein describe the External Affairs and Defence staffs as carefully trained, hierarchical elites, the very best and most selective personnel in government service. Trudeau, himself a product of both a moneyed elite and an educational elite, was unimpressed with these professionals and suspected them of being mindlessly rigid and bound to the status quo.
Trudeau was brilliant, the authors admit, but in an amateurish way. Regarding himself as the perennial outsider, he wanted to bring a fresh point of view to Canada’s problems, and especially the international problems, although he had no practical experience in these matters. Was NATO obsolete? Was the United Nations ineffectual? Was the American war in Vietnam basically wrong? Was anti-communism the only lens through which to look at Russia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere? These may have been legitimate questions, but they set off alarm bells in the External Affairs and Defence Departments, as well as among Canada’s allies. Trudeau may have been brilliant, but he was also erratic, in their view. The authors close the book with a quotation from a surprising source, Richard Nixon, who in 1969 dismissively said of Trudeau, he “was at times erratic with many of the characteristics so frequently associated with intellectuals” (p. 390). Nixon was right, conclude these authors. Clearly, Pierre Elliott Trudeau still stirs strong opinions. This book’s strength comes from the interviews with people who worked with him.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 4 June 2021
