Reflections – ‘72 election
In the 1972 election there were a number of questions that were largely economic. They were not yet beginning to shape up as constitutional. Now it was there because Trudeau wanted to do something with the constitution. They had a federal-provincial conference - Pearson had laid the beginning of that and Trudeau followed it up. But he did not make much progress because Quebec denied him. The question in 1972 was ‘stagflation’. Here we had a country with inflation but at the same time we had a deflated and invalid economy. What do you do? Your interest rates are going up and there was no economic boom.
The inflation thing was really the bugbear. And it happened again during the 1974 election because Stanfield fought with a promise for wage and price controls. Trudeau, of course, beat him, aided strongly by David Lewis. The New Democrats went ape like the trade unions. Price control was okay, but not wage control. Trudeau galloped home with that and within six months he brought them in. That is when John Turner began to think of leaving the party. And he did.
I thought that Stanfield had a fair campaign and he was, in a way, too gentlemanly. He was twenty votes away from having a good edge over Trudeau. That is how close he was. Trudeau was a phenomenally lucky man by winning so narrowly and then getting support from Lewis and the NDP during the minority period. The polls were showing the NDP okay, but the Conservatives down relative. Turner’s second budget of the minority government had bad news in it that drove off NDP support.
Lewis called me to ask my opinion of what he should do. I told him that he was going to be given a budget the NDP cannot swallow. That will give the government an excuse to go to the people. He said that the party and the leader of the NDP have never had so much attention. I reminded him that was what Bob Thompson had said in 1962-63. He had never had so much attention because he had the balance of power. He went on and defeated the Diefenbaker government and got ruined in the election. He did not lose his own seat, but the party took an awful spanking. Lewis was sure, saying that the party had so much good attention. A lot of that was paid to Stanley and him. But it did not do them any good. It was so stupid. I tried to get that through to him but I got nowhere. I said: “Don’t run against Stanfield. Run against Trudeau. An awful lot of people wanted him out.
Not very many New Democrats liked Trudeau. One of the things that happened there was that plain and ordinary people tended not to work well with Trudeau because he was so arrogant. He behaved in a way that you would expect a gay man to behave. There were thoughts of hearsay evidence around that he had experimented a great deal in his younger days – particularly in Paris. He was very well known for a couple of close friendships. I talked to one man who was close to him in his teenaged years and he said Trudeau was not gay, but absolutely awkward and silly with women. He was no great Romeo. He did not come into his own as a Romeo until he was 40-years old - and once Dick Chapman, whom I helped get a job doing sports on CJOH, wound up as Trudeau’s advance-man. All he ever told me was that I would not believe the percentage of women who want to have a fling with Trudeau.