A Canadian Political Thinker: Pierre Elliot Trudeau
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A CANADIAN POLITICAL THINKER: PIERRE ELLIOT TRUDEAU AN ANALYSIS OF HIS PUBLISHED WRITINGS 1950-1966 by GEORGE LESLIE HAYNAL B.A., Loyola College, 1967 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of Political Science We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA -July, 1970 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree tha permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Geotg^ L. Haynal Department of PnHtir.nl Sr.i e.nr.& The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Date l/ sPrt.PmhPr h 1Q70 ABSTKACT Pierre Elliott Trudeau was an active participant in the decade of social reform and political awakening that preceded the Quiet Revolu• tion in Quebec, and continued to act as a non-partisan social and polit• ical critic until his entry into the federal liberal party in 1966. He based his contribution as pamphleteer for various movements of reform on certain basic philosophical principles. These principles can be described as a belief in the absolute value of humanity, the ef• ficacy of reason in human action, and the necessity of moral participation by the individual in the determination of all phases of his existence. Though these principles are not systematically presented, they are dis- cernable and their understanding is essential as a first step in any appreciation of Trudeau. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION l a) The Subject of the Study 1 b) Purpose of the Essay 3 c) Organization 4 d) Bibliography 7 e) Biography 8 II MAN, SOCIETY, THE STATE 17 a) Introduction 17 b) Man • 18 c) Society and The State 30 d) The State's Duties 34 III DEMOCRACY 43 IV FEDERALISM 52 V NATIONALISM : 58 VI QUEBEC 68 VII CANADA 79 - VIII CONCLUSION 96 BIBLIOGRAPHY HI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION a) The Subject of the Study It is by now almost a gratuitous observation that Trudeau is an Actonian. He is, it is true, but in much the same way that Harold Laski, Jacques Maritain and a host of lesser political thinkers today are Acton- ians. If we restrict ourselves purely to the negative face of Trudeau's politics we could say that, yes, he is a disciple of the nineteenth cen• tury liberal school, yes, he fervently mistrusts political power. But if we turn the literature to its more positive side, we can instantly be• come convinced that, far from it, Trudeau feels the need for a positive state, or if we read some of his earlier less known pieces it would be very easy to mistake his writings for good French translations of Harold Laski's earnest pluralism. If the reader was more classically oriented, Platonist and Aristotelian ideas on the Polity, on the role of political responsibility, and on the nature of society would leap at him from Trudeau's pages. Though some have claimed to see Karl Marx re-incarnated in the polished prose of Pierre Trudeau, the similarity strikes only those (un• fortunately many) who are completely ignorant of what both men said, or worse, those who have some little and second-hand information on Marxism, not Marx.''' We can "accuse" Trudeau of being Marxian to the degree that 1 Pierre E. Trudeau, "Materiaux pour servir a une enque*te sur le clerical isme", Cit/ Libre, # 7, May, 1953. 2. any democratic socialist thinker or even as any social scientist can be accused of it. Since the subject is far too wide to deal with and has only an incidental relevance, only a few observations are necessary here. Trudeau is a democrat. He believes in human rationality, in free will aid most important, in individual responsibility. He believes in the natural obsolescence and consequent demise of the free enterprise economy, and is confident in the future of socialism. His main concern is not for the coming of this future, but whether this future will be democratic or totalitarian. He could hardly pass for a good Marxian with such a set of ideas. The dialectic is not among contending economic classes: it is between democratic forces and the totalitarian, between the "essences" of reason and irrationality within men. What philosophy does he follow then? If he is not a Marxian, Trudeau has used Marx. Nor is he a Platonist, an Actonian, a Fabian, nor in the last resort a Laskian, but has used their thoughts in forming his own. Are we trying to evade the question? Definitely not. Such an elu- siveness is in fact the answer: Trudeau belongs completely to no philos• ophical tradition, and yet he belongs to them all. He is perhaps the closest that Canada has achieved in a cosmopolitan political thinker; he ranges across the nations, rarely but sometimes the cultures and the ages of civilization. He has attempted to synthesize within a highly personal construct what he finds the best in all political thought. Though he may be no more than the Renaissance midget on the shoulders of classical giants, 3. Trudeau has constructed a complex and internally unassailable philosophy. His greatest interest and greatest failing stem together from the "total"- 2 ness of this thought, b) Purpose of the Essay The purpose of this essay is a straightforward examination of the writings of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Although he deserves a far wider treat• ment, there are a number of reasons why we cannot, at this point, attempt a political or philosophical biography. The subject of our study is not only in the prime of life but is the occupant of an important and sensitive office. Information about his personality and personal life beyond glimpses 3 in his own writing are unavailable. Though we shall try to place Trudeau in the Canadian political con• text as far as possible, we shall do so only to the degree that the context has a bearing on the content and import of his thought. We are not, I must emphasize at the beginning, studying Trudeau as the "prime minister in lat• ency". Though this may seem the most obvious rationale for a study of this nature, there are others of equal, if not higher, validity. 2 But Trudeau is not so purely a normative theorist as this description by association may imply. For though he was already writing a number of years before its publication, a good deal of his political theory is strongly re• miniscent of the systems approach taken by Gabriel Almond in the "Civic Culture" and it is far from impossible to alternate the name 'just society' based on rational responsibility with Almond's term 'civic society' based on a 'civic culture's1 participatory politics. It must not be forgotten either that much of Trudeau's fame stems from his sociological examination of Quebec in the first chapter of Trudeau (ed.), La Greve de l'Amiante, Editions du Jour, Montreal, 1956. 3 Martin Sullivan, Mandate 1968, Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto, 1968,p.372. 4. Trudeau is the embodiment of a period in the intellectual and political history of French Canadian society, whose complexities are only now beginning to receive serious academic attention. The role that Tru• deau1 s Cite Libre group played in the development of Quebec would be suf• ficient cause to examine his writings. We shall pay some attention to the concrete manifestations of their struggle later on in the paper. We cannot regard Trudeau's written material as the expression of an original political philosophy. But the failure to be original (if we can even use such value terms) cannot detract from the innate social and intellectual value of Trudeau's writings. They never claimed to be orig• inal, but they were didactic. Trudeau was a pamphleteer in the classical tradition, a tradition that has until very recently been totally absent from all but the French speaking part of this continent. Trudeau, the pamphleteer• ing social critic was a phenomenon inseparable from Quebec of the 1950's, the environment were public social criticism was so important, and could be ex• pressed in the medium Trudeau found so congenial - the journal. c) Organization The research task involved in this paper has been very complicated at times; this is not because of any scarcity of material, but rather as a result of the way that the material was written. Trudeau wrote in response to issues. Each article had to be a com• plete exposition of the writer's view point and had necessarily to contain 5. a capsulated if incomplete version of the philosophical premises of the argument. Reading Trudeau has consequently been repetitious, and it has been our major task to glean the philosophical argument which forms the connecting thread. The organization of the paper has consequently often followed a theoretical structure of its own, rather than any chronological or topical construct. Since Trudeau has been, if anything, all too consistent, the former approach would have been purely descriptive, and since his writing is topical, the latter would have consisted largely of indexing the articles Trudeau applies a number of basic principles to politics. These can be summed up as a belief in the dignity and uniqueness of a human being, in human freedom and socially expressed responsibility.