MEMOIRS OF A VERY CIVIL SERVANT Mackenzie King to Pierre Trudeau This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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-