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Northern Magus: Trudeau and Canada
Pierre Trudeau (1919-2000) was the 15th Prime Minister of Canada from April, 1968 to June, 1979 and from March, 1980 to June, 1984. Richard Gwyn describes what kind of a person Trudeau was and what kind of a Prime Minister he was--his person and his politics and how they affected Canada. 398 pages including Index. 9.25 x 6.25 inches. McClelland and Stewart Publishers, Toronto, Canada, 1980.
399 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Richard Gwyn
28 books12 followersfrom Wikipedia: Richard John Philip Jermy Gwyn, OC (born May 26, 1934) is a Canadian civil servant, journalist and author.
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June 2, 2021
Write-up of "the Northern Magus"
This book is a reminder of why i am no fan of the Liberals. Trudeau was larger than life in the press from 1968-1984 his time in office). This book reveals back room dealing and private maneuvering that most Canadians hadn't been privy to. Here are some salient points:
P19 ...Canadians are attracted to Trudeau because we see him as a man who has lived his dream, and ours.
P64 ... became an instant star (1967) by the way he argued: eloquent, cool, celebral yet impassioned... so modern so daring
P71 in June, 1968 Trudeau won 45% of the vote - a 15 year high water mark for the Liberals
P88 before Trudeau's defeat in 1979 more and more ministers complained about the disproportionate influence of his personal staff.
P89 in 1978 he changed the government's entire spending policy without bothering to consult his ministers.
P91 he would tell people that we should get together sometime but never followed up
P101 all constituency associations were requested to stage public debates: only 26 out of 262 complied
P102 half the population were under 25 - half of those were under the age of twelve [Not a great lot of voters there]
P132 the RCMP broke into left wing organizations office (Praxis) to steal and start a fire; composed and distributed fraudulent FLQ comminque urging violence; compiled a list of 21 federal servants who should not be employed (voting NDP was about as far as they went); burnt a barn north of Montreal to prevent a meeting; broke into other offices to steal files & membership lists; and screened applicants for federal jobs.
P140 during 1972-74 Trudeau's minority gov't: developed a new national energy policy; initiated a total review of social security; device of indexing made Canada's tax system unique in the world; by extending experimental abolition of capital punishment ensured it would disappear out of deuseatude; and created the Foreign Investment Review to screen takeovers.
P141 the enigma of the Liberal Party is: is it successful because of the way it is?; or is it the way it is because it is successful? The Liberals opponents, each have principles, over which they trip. The Liberal Party is not liberal. It is middle of the road establishment. It leans to the left, now to the right; most frequently to the left only because that's where the votes are. Voters can be bribed with their own money when they think it's other people's money.
P142 What's in it for Liberal workers?: special kind of jobs with security or status; transitory glory of being named to a Board or Commission; being able to talk to important guys [ministers] who appear on television; and being for the little guy. Liberals are born aged 35 and never grow older than 45. The sure way to be good to yourself is to be seen doing good to others, through "public service". Mostly they are lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs who get research contracts, civil servants, journalists, socially aware clergymen, and businessmen who work in trendy fringes like advertising and management consulting. Liberal men wear gold rimmed glasses and use blow driers. Liberal women carry briefcases; they abandoned blow dryers in 1980 for the rolled 1930's look. Liberal women are assertive but not aggressive;
P143 Liberal men are supportive but not scared. They know the difference between Manet and Monet, and between Pucci and Gucchi. Above all they know the difference between being In Power and Being Out.
P145 Trudeau was told in order to win he had to: convince Liberals he was a Liberal; convince Canadians he wanted to be PM; and keep the scrappy quality the public liked.
P146 he refused to take "rational government" seriously.
P147 ...it is seldom, simultaneously, in the interest of all the opposition parties to force an election (in a minority government)
P148 (to stay in power) he had two principles: duck rather than fight and rule by dividing. Many opposition days were arranged so that they would vote against each others motions. The younger NDP deeply mistrusted Trudeau.
P149 (by compomising with the NDP) the Liberals became more attractive to those that voted NDP.
P151 the Refundable Child Tax Credit was made in an old irrational way, to buy votes on the eve of an election.
P152 in October 1973 Arab oil exporting countries announced a 25% cut in production. The world pice of oil jumped from $3/barrel to $6/barrel and by year's end reached $10/ barrel. The industrial democracies hunkered down into "siege economies" from which most have yet to emerge [book published in 1980]
P153 Re Canada's oil industry no one (in gov't) knew anything about, nor cared about, since energy was so cheap... One conclusion was that Canada needed its own publically owned oil company through which government could learn what was going on. Trudeau made what Stanfield called a "masterful non-statement". The public became alarmed that Canada had no policy.
P155 (when) People said they liked wage and price controls, what they meant was they liked price controls, but wage controls only on the guy next door.
P158 He recognized the prime catalyst of contemporary voting behaviour is negativism: voters will vote against something with greater zest and conviction than they will vote for somebody or something. And that charisma was more impotant than content. Uninterested voters, who by definition have little faith in the process, can be convinced more easily to vote against something, than to vote for anything.
P160 Newcomers around the ministerial table knew they owed their political existence to Trudeau.
P162 more RCMP scandals came to light; the economy came close to collapse; Canada's strike record was second worst (Italy was #1); Trudeaus bilingualism collapsed.
P163 So few of the anglophone civil servants (who painfully and expensively learned French) used it on the job. Trudeau's critics had recommended for years that it be spent in the schools to educate the next generation. In 1976 when air traffic controllers and pilots went on strike to oppose bilingual air-traffic control, English Canada cheered.
The Montreal Olympics racked up a deficit of $995 Million, which English Canadians knew they would have to help pay for. Mirabel Airport (in Quebec) became an instant white elephant, that English Canadians knew they would have to help pay for. The $22 billion spending forecast became $32 billion.
P164 Trudeau was not aware that his wealth isolated himself from most of the Canadians; he couldn't relate.
P166 he spent public money extravagantly on a swimming pool and an armour plated Cadillac (which he didn't use) and things like $8,200 on a sofa.
P172 his Chief of Staff was indispensable because his greatest strength, management and manipulation of people, was Trudeau's greatest weakness. He prevented people from reaching Trudeau.
P173 in a Throne Speech said that "inflation was serious and urgent" then said nothing else about it.
P176 Canada was experiencing its worst combined inflation and unemployment since the Depression. Canadians care not at all about Trudeau's piorities, but cared deeply about the economy and crime on the streets. The solution was wage and price controls but a year previously Trudeau had said definitively, irrevocably, and repeatedly that controls would not work.
P178 we had a failure to translate scientific invention into commercial products and the inexplicable circumstance that despite mass unemployment and the world's most expensive education system we were critically short of skilled workers.
P179 who wants to threaten the entrenched self-interest of a profession - lawyers for instance of whom there were 25,000 in Canada and 10,000 in Japan [with four times the population]. Who wants to risk government prestige on a STOL plane, say - when it may end up, scores of millions of dollars later, like the Bricklin car?
P183 Wage settlements were, in fact, contributing only marginally to inflation. Inflation was being produced by high food prices resulting from world wide crop failures, the hike in oil prices and the world wide economic boom.
P188 Trudeau expected everyone to measure up to his intellectual standards but it never occurred to him to live up to their standards of human relationships. He never asked about ill wives of his ministers.
P190 Turner said publically "Trudeau is the most remarkable Canadian of our generation" and privately that he considers Trudeau the least likeable Canadian, since John Cabot discovered the place.
P195 In the 1979 election Canadians sent Trudeau the message they were fed up by the contradiction between rhetoric and reality.
P224 (after a tour to explain bilingualism Westerners knew no more about it than before, except they liked it even less. Unilingual Canadians (and three in four Francophones who spoke only French) would be disadvantaged in their lives by Bilingualism.
P225 Calgary claimed proportionately more students in immersion classes than any other city. Canada was developing a distinct social elite, of young, upper middle-class, bilingual graduates. Elitists failed to appreciate the fearful threat to job security that bilingualism presented to so many.
P227 Francophone civil servants constituted only 10% of the civil service while Francophones made up 27% of the population.
P228 Biligualism meant a loss of power for unilingual Canadians. Bilingualism had become a gigantic boondoggle. Among Anglophone graduates only 11% attained fluency and 80% scarcely used it at all.
P229 the number of bilingual position reached 75,000. You knew you had to be bilingual for hopes at promotion. Some senior public servants got to spend a year in Quebec at gov't expense, to never utter a word of French again.
P248 Quebec uniligualism, as Francophone Quebeckers quickly realized, meant that Angrophones would leave, leave behind their jobs, and houses at bargain prices. It meant Montreal would become irrevocably French. The Parti Quebecois government became one of the best in the country: democratic, progressive and the first to clear out the quagmire of patronage.
P277 the difference between the west of the prairies and everywere else in the country was that the prairies created themselves. The East provided a railway, some bank loans and some salt fish during the Depression: everything else, the prairie pioneers did themselves.
P278 because land and climate were so harsh and nothing could be done about that, just as nothing could be done when the rains didn't come to make wheat grow and world gluts made it hard to sell wheat. The West began to want the same as what Quebec wanted: respect, understanding, a sense of belonging. Trudeau, without intending to, turned them into outsiders again.
P279 their own PM neither understood nor cared what they were going through.
P282 in 1979 Calgary accounted for $1.3 billion of new construction, twice as much as Metropolitan Toronto (a city six times its size). Calgary's per capita income was calculated to be $2,000 higher than Sweden or West Germany.
P283 Saskatchewanians don't love the East exactly, but they do understand it more easily (than does Alberta).
P288 Lougheed owes the idea of the Heritage Trust Fund to Trudeau. He suggested Alberta hive off a portion of revenues into a capital account to shelter these sums from equalization payments.
The only aspect of the 1973-75 oil war is that Lougheed won and the outcome became clear when Ayatollah Khomeni caused oil prices to soar (due to the fall of the Shah) making the Heritage Fund balloon to (an estimated) $100 billion by Century end.
P289 Between 1974 and 1978, despite record profits, the oil industry halved ite effeotive tax rated Gulf Canada (in 1978* did not pay one cent in taxes.
P293 The Vietnam War made Quiet Diplomacy look sadly ineffective.
P294 By the end of the 1970s we had become perhaps the most isolationist country in the world, endlessly fascinated by our own problems, indifferent to the problems of everyone else.
P318 Even the weather was Trudeau's fault: he had discombulated Canadians by turning Fahrenheit into Celsius and Miles into Kilometres.
P356 All that lingers about the 1980 campaign are its sleazy nasty television commercials. The Conservatives imported the technique of negativism from the USA.
P378 ... of all our leaders Trudeau has been the least civil. Trudeau delighted in formenting confrontations; he has never played fair.
Typed using EasyKeyB
This book is a reminder of why i am no fan of the Liberals. Trudeau was larger than life in the press from 1968-1984 his time in office). This book reveals back room dealing and private maneuvering that most Canadians hadn't been privy to. Here are some salient points:
P19 ...Canadians are attracted to Trudeau because we see him as a man who has lived his dream, and ours.
P64 ... became an instant star (1967) by the way he argued: eloquent, cool, celebral yet impassioned... so modern so daring
P71 in June, 1968 Trudeau won 45% of the vote - a 15 year high water mark for the Liberals
P88 before Trudeau's defeat in 1979 more and more ministers complained about the disproportionate influence of his personal staff.
P89 in 1978 he changed the government's entire spending policy without bothering to consult his ministers.
P91 he would tell people that we should get together sometime but never followed up
P101 all constituency associations were requested to stage public debates: only 26 out of 262 complied
P102 half the population were under 25 - half of those were under the age of twelve [Not a great lot of voters there]
P132 the RCMP broke into left wing organizations office (Praxis) to steal and start a fire; composed and distributed fraudulent FLQ comminque urging violence; compiled a list of 21 federal servants who should not be employed (voting NDP was about as far as they went); burnt a barn north of Montreal to prevent a meeting; broke into other offices to steal files & membership lists; and screened applicants for federal jobs.
P140 during 1972-74 Trudeau's minority gov't: developed a new national energy policy; initiated a total review of social security; device of indexing made Canada's tax system unique in the world; by extending experimental abolition of capital punishment ensured it would disappear out of deuseatude; and created the Foreign Investment Review to screen takeovers.
P141 the enigma of the Liberal Party is: is it successful because of the way it is?; or is it the way it is because it is successful? The Liberals opponents, each have principles, over which they trip. The Liberal Party is not liberal. It is middle of the road establishment. It leans to the left, now to the right; most frequently to the left only because that's where the votes are. Voters can be bribed with their own money when they think it's other people's money.
P142 What's in it for Liberal workers?: special kind of jobs with security or status; transitory glory of being named to a Board or Commission; being able to talk to important guys [ministers] who appear on television; and being for the little guy. Liberals are born aged 35 and never grow older than 45. The sure way to be good to yourself is to be seen doing good to others, through "public service". Mostly they are lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs who get research contracts, civil servants, journalists, socially aware clergymen, and businessmen who work in trendy fringes like advertising and management consulting. Liberal men wear gold rimmed glasses and use blow driers. Liberal women carry briefcases; they abandoned blow dryers in 1980 for the rolled 1930's look. Liberal women are assertive but not aggressive;
P143 Liberal men are supportive but not scared. They know the difference between Manet and Monet, and between Pucci and Gucchi. Above all they know the difference between being In Power and Being Out.
P145 Trudeau was told in order to win he had to: convince Liberals he was a Liberal; convince Canadians he wanted to be PM; and keep the scrappy quality the public liked.
P146 he refused to take "rational government" seriously.
P147 ...it is seldom, simultaneously, in the interest of all the opposition parties to force an election (in a minority government)
P148 (to stay in power) he had two principles: duck rather than fight and rule by dividing. Many opposition days were arranged so that they would vote against each others motions. The younger NDP deeply mistrusted Trudeau.
P149 (by compomising with the NDP) the Liberals became more attractive to those that voted NDP.
P151 the Refundable Child Tax Credit was made in an old irrational way, to buy votes on the eve of an election.
P152 in October 1973 Arab oil exporting countries announced a 25% cut in production. The world pice of oil jumped from $3/barrel to $6/barrel and by year's end reached $10/ barrel. The industrial democracies hunkered down into "siege economies" from which most have yet to emerge [book published in 1980]
P153 Re Canada's oil industry no one (in gov't) knew anything about, nor cared about, since energy was so cheap... One conclusion was that Canada needed its own publically owned oil company through which government could learn what was going on. Trudeau made what Stanfield called a "masterful non-statement". The public became alarmed that Canada had no policy.
P155 (when) People said they liked wage and price controls, what they meant was they liked price controls, but wage controls only on the guy next door.
P158 He recognized the prime catalyst of contemporary voting behaviour is negativism: voters will vote against something with greater zest and conviction than they will vote for somebody or something. And that charisma was more impotant than content. Uninterested voters, who by definition have little faith in the process, can be convinced more easily to vote against something, than to vote for anything.
P160 Newcomers around the ministerial table knew they owed their political existence to Trudeau.
P162 more RCMP scandals came to light; the economy came close to collapse; Canada's strike record was second worst (Italy was #1); Trudeaus bilingualism collapsed.
P163 So few of the anglophone civil servants (who painfully and expensively learned French) used it on the job. Trudeau's critics had recommended for years that it be spent in the schools to educate the next generation. In 1976 when air traffic controllers and pilots went on strike to oppose bilingual air-traffic control, English Canada cheered.
The Montreal Olympics racked up a deficit of $995 Million, which English Canadians knew they would have to help pay for. Mirabel Airport (in Quebec) became an instant white elephant, that English Canadians knew they would have to help pay for. The $22 billion spending forecast became $32 billion.
P164 Trudeau was not aware that his wealth isolated himself from most of the Canadians; he couldn't relate.
P166 he spent public money extravagantly on a swimming pool and an armour plated Cadillac (which he didn't use) and things like $8,200 on a sofa.
P172 his Chief of Staff was indispensable because his greatest strength, management and manipulation of people, was Trudeau's greatest weakness. He prevented people from reaching Trudeau.
P173 in a Throne Speech said that "inflation was serious and urgent" then said nothing else about it.
P176 Canada was experiencing its worst combined inflation and unemployment since the Depression. Canadians care not at all about Trudeau's piorities, but cared deeply about the economy and crime on the streets. The solution was wage and price controls but a year previously Trudeau had said definitively, irrevocably, and repeatedly that controls would not work.
P178 we had a failure to translate scientific invention into commercial products and the inexplicable circumstance that despite mass unemployment and the world's most expensive education system we were critically short of skilled workers.
P179 who wants to threaten the entrenched self-interest of a profession - lawyers for instance of whom there were 25,000 in Canada and 10,000 in Japan [with four times the population]. Who wants to risk government prestige on a STOL plane, say - when it may end up, scores of millions of dollars later, like the Bricklin car?
P183 Wage settlements were, in fact, contributing only marginally to inflation. Inflation was being produced by high food prices resulting from world wide crop failures, the hike in oil prices and the world wide economic boom.
P188 Trudeau expected everyone to measure up to his intellectual standards but it never occurred to him to live up to their standards of human relationships. He never asked about ill wives of his ministers.
P190 Turner said publically "Trudeau is the most remarkable Canadian of our generation" and privately that he considers Trudeau the least likeable Canadian, since John Cabot discovered the place.
P195 In the 1979 election Canadians sent Trudeau the message they were fed up by the contradiction between rhetoric and reality.
P224 (after a tour to explain bilingualism Westerners knew no more about it than before, except they liked it even less. Unilingual Canadians (and three in four Francophones who spoke only French) would be disadvantaged in their lives by Bilingualism.
P225 Calgary claimed proportionately more students in immersion classes than any other city. Canada was developing a distinct social elite, of young, upper middle-class, bilingual graduates. Elitists failed to appreciate the fearful threat to job security that bilingualism presented to so many.
P227 Francophone civil servants constituted only 10% of the civil service while Francophones made up 27% of the population.
P228 Biligualism meant a loss of power for unilingual Canadians. Bilingualism had become a gigantic boondoggle. Among Anglophone graduates only 11% attained fluency and 80% scarcely used it at all.
P229 the number of bilingual position reached 75,000. You knew you had to be bilingual for hopes at promotion. Some senior public servants got to spend a year in Quebec at gov't expense, to never utter a word of French again.
P248 Quebec uniligualism, as Francophone Quebeckers quickly realized, meant that Angrophones would leave, leave behind their jobs, and houses at bargain prices. It meant Montreal would become irrevocably French. The Parti Quebecois government became one of the best in the country: democratic, progressive and the first to clear out the quagmire of patronage.
P277 the difference between the west of the prairies and everywere else in the country was that the prairies created themselves. The East provided a railway, some bank loans and some salt fish during the Depression: everything else, the prairie pioneers did themselves.
P278 because land and climate were so harsh and nothing could be done about that, just as nothing could be done when the rains didn't come to make wheat grow and world gluts made it hard to sell wheat. The West began to want the same as what Quebec wanted: respect, understanding, a sense of belonging. Trudeau, without intending to, turned them into outsiders again.
P279 their own PM neither understood nor cared what they were going through.
P282 in 1979 Calgary accounted for $1.3 billion of new construction, twice as much as Metropolitan Toronto (a city six times its size). Calgary's per capita income was calculated to be $2,000 higher than Sweden or West Germany.
P283 Saskatchewanians don't love the East exactly, but they do understand it more easily (than does Alberta).
P288 Lougheed owes the idea of the Heritage Trust Fund to Trudeau. He suggested Alberta hive off a portion of revenues into a capital account to shelter these sums from equalization payments.
The only aspect of the 1973-75 oil war is that Lougheed won and the outcome became clear when Ayatollah Khomeni caused oil prices to soar (due to the fall of the Shah) making the Heritage Fund balloon to (an estimated) $100 billion by Century end.
P289 Between 1974 and 1978, despite record profits, the oil industry halved ite effeotive tax rated Gulf Canada (in 1978* did not pay one cent in taxes.
P293 The Vietnam War made Quiet Diplomacy look sadly ineffective.
P294 By the end of the 1970s we had become perhaps the most isolationist country in the world, endlessly fascinated by our own problems, indifferent to the problems of everyone else.
P318 Even the weather was Trudeau's fault: he had discombulated Canadians by turning Fahrenheit into Celsius and Miles into Kilometres.
P356 All that lingers about the 1980 campaign are its sleazy nasty television commercials. The Conservatives imported the technique of negativism from the USA.
P378 ... of all our leaders Trudeau has been the least civil. Trudeau delighted in formenting confrontations; he has never played fair.
Typed using EasyKeyB
February 7, 2021
Faute de pouvoir donner cinq étrons, je le donne une étoile.
This work is pompous and has nothing of consequence to say about its subject. It is hard to understand how a journalist of Gwyn's quality produced such trash. Presumably he was trying to emulate Peter Newman.
I am adding this work to my GR database some 35 years after having read it because I just finished Gwyn's admirable biography of Smallwood. If the Northern Magus had not been so dreadful I would have read the magnificant Smallwood book 25 years sooner.
This work is pompous and has nothing of consequence to say about its subject. It is hard to understand how a journalist of Gwyn's quality produced such trash. Presumably he was trying to emulate Peter Newman.
I am adding this work to my GR database some 35 years after having read it because I just finished Gwyn's admirable biography of Smallwood. If the Northern Magus had not been so dreadful I would have read the magnificant Smallwood book 25 years sooner.
October 3, 2024
The author has an engaging style which allows you to fly through chapters without noticing. This, accompanied with large amounts of detail on Pierre Trudeau's character, and his style of governance, makes for an excellent book. But, I think the author started writing this book shortly after Trudeau lost the 1979 election - thinking that was the end of his Prime Ministership - and finished writing shortly after the referendum in 1980. Which makes it hard to read the book, as it touched on Trudeau's failures with creating a constitution, and his successes with winning the referendum; all the while knowing that the author is unaware of the problems to arise with the 1983 constitution, and the 1995 referendum.
December 29, 2008
Gwyn has a sense of style and a marvelous eye for the anecdote that illuminates history
January 18, 2011
A book that will always be coloured by high school experience. Sitting in the library, DEVOURING this book, and writing my first kick-ass political essay...god, those were good days! :)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews