Trudeaumania by Robert Wright

Author:Robert Wright [Wright, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2016-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Monday, February 19, appeared to be an unexceptional day in the House of Commons, except that the government benches were noticeably thin. Prime Minister Lester Pearson was on vacation in Jamaica. Another 47 of the Liberals’ 130 MPs were away, including leadership hopefuls Paul Martin, Joe Greene, and John Turner. Of the government’s top ministers, only Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau and Finance Minister Mitchell Sharp were present in the House.

Sharp was nominally in charge when Deputy Speaker Herman Batten unexpectedly called for a vote on Bill C-193, a Liberal measure to impose an income surtax. For seventy-eight minutes, the parliamentary bells rang out. The Opposition Tories managed to scramble some of their MPs into the House for the vote, but the governing Liberals were caught flat-footed. The Liberals lost the vote 84 to 82, when the NDP, Créditistes, Socreds, and one independent MP voted with the Tories.

Because C-193 was a money bill, the Opposition immediately launched into a chorus of “Resign!” Lester Pearson got a phone call at 10:30 p.m. from his executive assistant, Torrance Wylie, telling him breathlessly that the government had been defeated on a tax bill. “I was flabbergasted,” Pearson later recalled. “When he indicated the circumstances of our defeat, I was not only flabbergasted, I was furious.”43 Pearson roused himself at 5:30 the next morning to catch an early flight to Ottawa. He met his cabinet over lunch, conveyed his anger in no uncertain terms, and began to navigate the tricky process of retaining power. “I was not too worried about the situation politically, when I learned that it had been a snap vote,” Pearson later wrote. “It was a trap, of course, a legitimate parliamentary trick. When I heard all about this, I was concerned only with what to do. We had to refuse the demand that we resign on this vote.”44

Pearson asked Tory leader Robert Stanfield for a twenty-four-hour adjournment of the House of Commons to allow the government some breathing room. Stanfield, to his everlasting credit as a parliamentarian and a gentleman, obliged the prime minister. Pearson took to the airwaves to tell Canadians that the vote had been merely “a hazard of minority government” and did not constitute a true defeat. He also met with his top advisers, including Pierre Trudeau, and drafted the following confidence motion: “That this House does not regard its vote in connection with third reading of Bill C-193, which had carried in all previous stages, as a vote of non-confidence in the government.” The motion was tabled in the Commons on Wednesday, February 21. A week-long brouhaha followed, Stanfield arguing that the government must resign, Pearson countering that it need not. When the dust finally settled, on February 28, the minority Liberals were sustained in power by a vote of 138 to 119—in no small measure because the Créditistes, who feared the outcome of a snap election, voted with the government.45

Pierre Trudeau did not fare particularly well over the course of this non-confidence episode. Far from breaking

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