The Constant Liberal: Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left by Christo Aivalis

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Constant Liberal: Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left by Christo Aivalis Thirstan Falconer Aivalis, Christo – The Constant Liberal: Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018. Pp. 278. The enigmatic Pierre Elliott Trudeau has been the focal point of significant works in Canadian history and political science since his ascent to the height of Canadian politics in 1968. Trudeau's life before and after his political career, as well as his 15 years in the prime minister's office, has drawn ample interest from scholars, journalists, and popular writers alike. Christo Aivalis's The Constant Liberal adds a leftist critique to the existing Trudeau literature and orients its examination to the labour and left movements that the prime minister interacted with between the mid-1940s through to his retirement in 1984. Aivalis challenges the "great man" narrative and argues that Trudeau was "equally the product of societal forces, intellectual currents, and personal relationships" (p. x), breaking with earlier biographers such as Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson who portrayed the former prime minister as an intellectual and political marvel. Aivalis's investigation of the fifteenth prime minister is a welcome and fresh addition to a body of literature that has increased in popularity since Trudeau's death in 2000. Though Aivalis's book is not a ground-breaking work on Trudeau, it is a must-read for historians interested in the political left since 1945 in Canada. The Constant Liberal argues that though Trudeau fought for a modern liberal order in Quebec and across the country, his views on liberalism were fundamentally different than the workers and democratic socialists he occasionally aligned with. Aivalis writes that instead of abandoning liberal capitalism during economic crises, Trudeau bolstered it by "absorbing leftist programs" and refashioned them as "benevolent liberalism" (p. xi). Aivalis challenges two core assertions about Trudeau : that he was a socialist bent on upending capitalism and that he was a pragmatic leftist who sought to contain the most negative characteristics of the capitalist system. Aivalis argues that in Quebec Trudeau built alliances with labour and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) to transform the province into a modern and democratic state, while in the federal arena he weakened labour and leftist voices to further his vision of individual rights and freedoms. Aivalis examines Trudeau's relationship with the left-wing political parties in Quebec and Canada as well as his government's public policy approaches with the "Just Society," the Foreign Investment Review Agency, National Energy Program, wage and price controls, as well as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms during his tenure as prime minister. In the first chapter, Aivalis challenges the historiography and argues that Trudeau was a liberal since his time at Harvard University. It was at Harvard, Aivalis argues, that Trudeau "learned the importance of constitutions, the dangers of extremism, the virtues of Keynesianism, and the celebration of liberal [End Page 477] democracy" (p. 3). Trudeau spent the 1950s building alliances with prominent members of the CCF and its Quebec wing, the Parti social démocratique du Québec (PSD). It is these relationships, Aivalis argues, that mislead historians searching for Trudeau's socialist credentials. In regard to Trudeau's intellectual expressions, Aivalis cites Denis Monière, who argued that while Cité libre authors were "concerned with elements of capitalism," they were ultimately pro-capitalist (p. 10). Aivalis argues that Trudeau believed that recognizing and negotiating "with workers and by taking an open approach to the communist bloc, liberal capitalism would stand a better chance of preserving its dominance" (p. 20). His analysis of the 1949 Asbestos strike directly challenges the intentions of Trudeau. Aivalis argues that the strike was Trudeau's chance to "champion a strike pitted against a political regime that he deemed undemocratic" (p. 23) and was an opportunity to weaken the Duplessis government. It was in Asbestos that the future prime minister unleashed fiery rhetoric extolling "the values of democracy and liberty" and urged the workers to keep fighting (p. 23), beginning a turning point in the anti-Duplessis movement. While Aivalis makes compelling arguments that contest Trudeau's socialist...