Memoirs of a Very Civil Servant: Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau

437 Pages·2000·23.028 MB·English

by  Gordon Robertson

MEMOIRS OF A VERY CIVIL SERVANT
Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau
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MEMOIRS OF A
VERY CIVIL SERVANT
Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau
Gordon Robertson
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
Reprinted 2001
ISBN 0-8020-4445-X
Printed on acid-free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Robertson, Gordon, 1917-
Memoirs of a very civil servant: Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-4445-X
1. Robertson, Gordon, 1917- . 2. Canada - Politics and
government - 1935- . 3. Civil service - Canada - Biography.
I. Title.
FC601.R63A3 2000 971.06'092 COO-930862-8
F1034.3.R625A3 2000
All photographs are from the author's collection. Maps by William
Constable.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
IV
To Bea,
for whose patient forbearance with my years of preoccupation with the
people and events in this account, and for whose encouragement during
months of my slow writing about them, I am profoundly grateful.
v
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Contents
Preface ix ix
Acknowledgments xv
Part One
From the Prairies to Ottawa, 1917-1941
1. From the Prairies to Oxford, 1917-1938 3
2. From Oxford to Ottawa, 1938-1941 18
Part Two
External Affairs and Mackenzie King, 1941-1948
3. The Department of External Affairs, 1941-1945 35
4. Working for Mackenzie King, 1945-1948 47
Part Three
Louis St Laurent and a New North, 1948-1963
5. Working with Louis St Laurent, 1948-1953 75
6. Canada Discovers the North, 1953-1957 107
7. Governing the Northwest Territories, 1953-1957 146
8. The Territories under the Vision, 1958-1963 165
9. The Emerging North 200
Part Four
'Mike' Pearson and a Changing Canada, 1963-1968
10. Pearson and the Quiet Revolution 211
11. The Symbols and Structure of Canada 225
Contents
Part Five
Winds of Change with Pierre Trudeau, 1968-1980
12. Pierre Trudeau and a New Style of Governing, 1968-1970 251
13. Trudeau and the Constitution, 1968-1979 269
14. Transition and Change, 1978-1980 299
Part Six
Trudeau's 'Power Play,' Meech Lake, and the
Charlottetown Accord, 1980-1992
15. The Trudeau Power Play, 1980-1982 321
16. Away from Government 328
17. Meech Lake: The Best Hope Lost 337
18. Meech Lake Dead: Where Next? 349
Epilogue 375
Notes 385
Index 395
Maps
The Territories of Canada, 1 April 1999 104
Canadian Arctic Marine Jurisdictions 105
The Circumpolar North 106
Illustrations follow page 208
viii
Preface
Early in 1997 Maclean's magazine asked twenty-five specialists in Cana-
dian political history to rank the prime ministers of Canada since Con-
federation on a scale from zero to ten. The top six in their collective
rating were: Mackenzie King, Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Wilfrid Laurier,
Louis St Laurent, Pierre Trudeau, and Lester Pearson. About a year
earlier, in working on this book, I had done a rating of my own and had
selected the same six. It was my good fortune during thirty-eight years in
the public service to work closely with four of those top leaders of our
country. They presided over and guided the conduct and policies of our
governments for fifty of the eighty years since the First World War. They
all had an outstanding influence on the kind of Canada we have today. I
worked with one or another of them from 1945 to 1953 and from 1963 to
1979 - twenty-four years in all.
One of the national contributions Mr St Laurent made was to decide
in 1953 that the time had come to end the state of 'absence of mind' in
which Canada had treated the 40 per cent of our country that lies north
of the provinces: the Yukon and Northwest Territories and, especially,
the true Arctic - the great area beyond the tree line then and still
inhabited almost entirely by Inuit. Another decision he took was to put a
new team in charge of the new policy. Jean Lesage, later to become
premier of Quebec, was to be the minister, and I, at the ripe age of thirty-
six, was to be his deputy minister and also commissioner of the North-
west Territories.
As commissioner I was to combine the roles of a provincial premier
and of speaker of a provincial legislature. That legislature - the Council
of the Northwest Territories - was in part elected by the voters of the
western, subarctic part of the Territories and in part appointed by fed-