What I recall about the Trudeau years (I was born in 1957) is just how bad they were. With our natural resources, we should have been one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Instead, we had years of economic lethargy. Both he and his son were terrible leaders who did irreparable damage to Canada. I also recall how lionized Pierre was in the mainstream press and the CBC. Prior to Pierre, we did not have Western alienation and Quebec separatism.
Of course, Pierre Trudeau wasn't responsible, as you put it, for "worldwide stagflation." What did he do, though, to mitigate its effects on Canadians and our economy? I'm having trouble trying to find anything meaningful.
We must resist trying to dismiss what's happened under the watch of our leaders and their actions within our borders by pointing to events outside them. Those are excuses that won't cut it.
I fear we're going through the same exercise today with the current office holder and his response to the challenges posed by a transformational President stirring the pot in Washington and around the world. Our national fate depends on what he does, not on what foreign leaders are trying to do to us...
The world economy got hit with a two by four in 1975. In France, the postwar period is routinely divided by historians into “Les trente glorieuses” -- the 30 “glorious” years after 1944 -- and “La crise,” which is everything since. What does a national leader do when a locally concentrated commodity skyrockets in value? I can think of only two options: spread the wealth or don't. Neither choice would have won Trudeau a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score. Even his most indulgent biographers, McCall and Clarkson, give him very mixed marks on the economy.
"What does a national leader do when a locally concentrated commodity skyrockets in value?"
Easy. One builds a sovereign wealth fund, or since Alberta owns the resource, one tells Alberta build a sovereign wealth fund, which has the beneficial effect for the nation whether it is a national or a provincial one. One does not p$ss it down the drain like Trudeau did. (Norway did not p$ss it down the drain when North Sea oil was discovered in the aftermath of the oil crisis. The UK did what the Canadian Liberals did, p$ss it down the drain.)
One also builds a pipeline from Alberta to and through Quebec throught to Atlantic Canada, when there truly would have been a national concensus for one. (And one could have asked the Alberta Sovereign Wealth Fund which had been created to fund the building of it.)
Norway made the decision to build a sovereign wealth fund even after oil prices collapsed in part due to the discovery of North Sea oil.
The correct decision was out there. Other countries were capable of making it. Trudeau did not.
And he failed to make the decision to complete the transcontinental pipeline, to match the transcontinental railroad as a foundational nation building project, that would serve as a foundation for national sovereignty indefinitely into the future, when the need for one, because of the oil crisis, became obvious.
We did build a Sovereign Wealth Fund here in Alberta!
And, we then were pilloried, envied and opposed throughout Canada.
Sure, you could have asked our Sovereign Wealth Fund to pay for that pipeline - we bought Quebec government bonds, after all - but then, you would have had to get the ROC to agree.
As for pissing wealth down the drain, yes, that happened. It is called over taxation of we Albertans in the name of equalization.
Oh, and this comparison to Norway, not a valid one at all. Norway's oil is in the North Sea and a small well provides multiples of tens of thousand barrels a day whereas in Alberta our conventional oil industry has many wells pumping less than one hundred barrels of oil a day. Much different economics. Of course, we now have oil sands plants that are much more productive but ..... what did I say about over taxation (Canada, not Norway) of resource producing areas that took surpluses from that Sovereign Wealth Fund?
No Ken Albertans are taxed exactly the same as other Canadians. No more, no less. Our incomes are higher, so more taxes paid. Interesting fact: in 2022, ON residents paid $73 billion in Canadian income tax (federal) Vs the $37 billion paid by QC, the $27 Billion paid by BC and the $23 billion paid by Albertans.
And please do not attempt to rewrite history:
1) Trudeau could no more have initiated a sovereign wealth fund than he did a National Energy Program.
2) With regard to building a trans Canada pipeline that is for proponents in the oil industry to propose and to fund. Really you know the oil companies built all pipelines at that time in the 1970’s and 1980’s and these Alberta based oil companies did not see a trans Canada pipeline as being as profitable as those built to transport our oil to the USA. Too, I doubt you would have had the needed public support and public consensus for such a pipeline.
One of the things that comes through very clearly from The Coutts Diaries is that if the Pierre Trudeau government had had any clear idea what to do about stagflation, they would’ve done it. It’s not like they weren’t aware of it.
I took my first economics course in the middle of the ‘70s. I well remember the prof telling us that the traditional neo-classical approach was “if there’s too much inflation, create a little unemployment. If unemployment gets too bad, create a little inflation. But now you can’t do that.” That was the problem.
A fascinating interview. Too bad that the relevant pieces in Jim Coutts' diaries come well after the October Crisis. The National Energy Program, repatriation of the Constitution, and the Charter were, of course, all important chapters. Well before that, though, was another significant period in our country's young history, that time in 1970 which could have gone one way or another.
I get it, though. Coutts, seen then as a Pearson relic, was probably still sitting on the outside looking in at Trudeau and his inner circle. Yet, when I mentioned that period in a recent discussion with others, the shocking response from two: "Whats a FLQ?"
The same can be said about the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing, its 40th anniversary earlier this year treated more as a footnote than as the single largest act of terrorism in Canadian history that it should be - our national ignorance extending to persons I know who later emigrated to Canada from, of all places, India.
Santayana's words, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" looms large over Canada. Our historical knowledge gap is our Achilles Heel.
So, I will purchase a copy of Ron Graham's book to get a better understanding of probably one of the more enigmatic Prime Ministers in our country's history ("enigmatic" does not apply to his son, the self-absorbed and predictable character that he was and is).
I hope others in our country do too - many others...
I was born in 1943 and became a Landed Immigrant in 1974. My first more-or-less real job was thanks to a LIP grant, one of Trudeau's (Coutts'?) programs. (LIP = Local Initiatives Program.) So I've always had a special affection for him. As a trained economist I agree, however, that his appreciation of economic matters was lousy (and disastrous).
Living in Germany before becoming a landed immigrant in 1970, my favourite magazine was a weekly called "der Stern". Not a week went by without a story about the famous Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. Not his politics, but his weird antics and romantic escapades were on display.
Entered Canada in November 1970 during the Quebec October Crises, when the war measures act was in place, a strange time to immigrate.
I can tell I’m really old, because all this stuff feels like yesterday to me. As soon as you mentioned Trudeau‘s purging of the Pearson people and then his desperate recalling of them after the ‘72 election, I couldn’t help thinking of the way Larry Zolf characterized Trudeau’s move in his book Dance of the Dialectic: from philosopher king to Mackenzie King.
Sutherland House often prints modest original runs and indigo is sometimes timid about buying them. We essentially had to convince them both that my wee Trudeau book was a bestseller. Telling your local store that you wanna buy the book would help. I'm the meantime I wonder whether Ben McNally has it
Sounds to me Trudeau senior was as incompetent and uninterested in the affair of the country as junior was and both were equally as vindictive as the other. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. It may be a Trudeau thing, maybe a liberal thing, probably both. In any case, it shows Canadians haven't learned a thing since then.
I was a tiny dung-beetle in the corridors of power when Jim Coutts - always "Mr. Coutts" to me and my ilk - held undisputed sway over Canada's Parliament and government. (I remember sightings of Ron Graham back then, too.) I cannot wait to find out what was really happening all around me in those distant days.
Paul, you lament (below) that no one in Canadian journalism is doing the deep-dive Ron Graham-style book on the main political players and their entourages. Are we really going to have to wait 10 years to find out what was really going in Trudeau's last year in office or hear about Carney's path to the PMO? You're the person to do this.
Wells: "But every time an election comes around, I think: when is somebody just going to absolutely go to town on the circle of people around Pierre Poillievre, the circle of people around Justin Trudeau, the open secret that Mark Carney had people campaigning for him to become leader of the Liberal party for years before he announced himself as a candidate. Soup to nuts. The whole crazy drama of it. And it is so difficult for most working journalists to even begin to scrape together the resources to tell that story. It doesn't even occur to most people that that's a kind of story that you can tell. We've got more access to more sources of information and communication than ever before, and the whole story seems impoverished compared to what it used to be."
I worked at a magazine where, over the space of a decade, I came to understand that it was becoming my job to do what 20 journalists used to do. I'd hate to repeat that experience, except on the scale of an entire industry. When Allan Rock was justice minister, he could reasonably expect a bunch of different reporters with a bunch of different perspectives would write a dozen ambitious newspaper profiles of him in a year. I get why that number isn't as high today — I've written about it, in some detail — but I need the number to be larger than one.
No pressure, Paul. In a nation of 40+ million only a handful of people (and we can all name them) can do this type of long-form journalism-book-length profiling--as you found out with your last book. There's a market for it judging from the popularity of Canadian political reporting in substack newsletters and podcasts. I listen to the Bulwark podcast and this American political show sold-out in Toronto.
Will we find out from the diaries how much of a fubard Dept of Defence that Pearson handed to Trudeau? Or since it was well known that PET couldn't give two hoots about the defence of Canada that it was Jim Coutts that quarterbacked the continued (and continuing?) decay of the CAF?
I finished The Coutts Diaries this morning. There's an interesting aspect of the book that started to occur me about halfway through the book and was looming very large by the end.
Many reviews and articles have mentioned what they like to refer to as his "high stakes" poker games. The further I read in the the book, the more troubling the poker entries were to me. Here's a guy who is, in effect, the number 2 person in running the country (even ahead of Pitfield, at least to hear Coutts tell it) who is routinely taking part in literally all-night poker games (they often go to 8:00 am the next day, and one actually went till 11:00 am) and then picking himself up, sometimes with a hangover, takes a quick shower and goes off to meet with the PM or the cabinet and run the country.
Even more troubling, while he sometimes comes out ahead, more often he loses astonishing amounts of money. At least a couple of times, he loses $13,000 in one night. That would make most people blanch even today, but in 1979 or 1980, that would have been equivalent to well over $50,000 today, according to my trusty Canadian Inflation Calculator.
Today we would recognize this behaviour as a serious gambling addiction, or if not an addiction, at least a problem. But never once in the diaries is there any indication that anyone ever called him on it, or suggested to him that this might not be a good way for the PM's principal secretary to be conducting himself. Instead, an increasing number of party bigwigs think he should be an MP, a cabinet minister, and maybe even the next Liberal leader. And Coutts himself never suggests or intimates, or even seems to recognize, that he has a personal issue that might be disqualifying.
But the other thing that struck me as really interesting is that Coutts never once tells us, or even gives us any hint, of who is joining him in these all-night poker marathons. Were they fellow politicos? Civil servants? Just randos from the Ottawa scene? A rotating cast, or the same people over and over again? There are no hints at all. Coutts is very, very discreet about his poker partners -- even in his personal diary. Almost as if he knew they would eventually be scrutinized for publication.
I agree with a lot of this. And I think it's fair to say that self-destructive behaviour on something approximating this scale has hardly been eradicated from today's politics.
I just went back and re-read your interview with Graham and saw that you did in fact flag this, and Graham called it kind of an addiction. But once I actually read the book, it still surprised me how extreme (at least to my eyes) his poker behaviour was.
What I recall about the Trudeau years (I was born in 1957) is just how bad they were. With our natural resources, we should have been one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Instead, we had years of economic lethargy. Both he and his son were terrible leaders who did irreparable damage to Canada. I also recall how lionized Pierre was in the mainstream press and the CBC. Prior to Pierre, we did not have Western alienation and Quebec separatism.
Explain how the Canadian PM was responsible for worldwide stagflation in the ‘70s.
Of course, Pierre Trudeau wasn't responsible, as you put it, for "worldwide stagflation." What did he do, though, to mitigate its effects on Canadians and our economy? I'm having trouble trying to find anything meaningful.
We must resist trying to dismiss what's happened under the watch of our leaders and their actions within our borders by pointing to events outside them. Those are excuses that won't cut it.
I fear we're going through the same exercise today with the current office holder and his response to the challenges posed by a transformational President stirring the pot in Washington and around the world. Our national fate depends on what he does, not on what foreign leaders are trying to do to us...
The world economy got hit with a two by four in 1975. In France, the postwar period is routinely divided by historians into “Les trente glorieuses” -- the 30 “glorious” years after 1944 -- and “La crise,” which is everything since. What does a national leader do when a locally concentrated commodity skyrockets in value? I can think of only two options: spread the wealth or don't. Neither choice would have won Trudeau a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score. Even his most indulgent biographers, McCall and Clarkson, give him very mixed marks on the economy.
"What does a national leader do when a locally concentrated commodity skyrockets in value?"
Easy. One builds a sovereign wealth fund, or since Alberta owns the resource, one tells Alberta build a sovereign wealth fund, which has the beneficial effect for the nation whether it is a national or a provincial one. One does not p$ss it down the drain like Trudeau did. (Norway did not p$ss it down the drain when North Sea oil was discovered in the aftermath of the oil crisis. The UK did what the Canadian Liberals did, p$ss it down the drain.)
One also builds a pipeline from Alberta to and through Quebec throught to Atlantic Canada, when there truly would have been a national concensus for one. (And one could have asked the Alberta Sovereign Wealth Fund which had been created to fund the building of it.)
One is always grateful for easy answers.
Norway made the decision to build a sovereign wealth fund even after oil prices collapsed in part due to the discovery of North Sea oil.
The correct decision was out there. Other countries were capable of making it. Trudeau did not.
And he failed to make the decision to complete the transcontinental pipeline, to match the transcontinental railroad as a foundational nation building project, that would serve as a foundation for national sovereignty indefinitely into the future, when the need for one, because of the oil crisis, became obvious.
We did build a Sovereign Wealth Fund here in Alberta!
And, we then were pilloried, envied and opposed throughout Canada.
Sure, you could have asked our Sovereign Wealth Fund to pay for that pipeline - we bought Quebec government bonds, after all - but then, you would have had to get the ROC to agree.
As for pissing wealth down the drain, yes, that happened. It is called over taxation of we Albertans in the name of equalization.
Oh, and this comparison to Norway, not a valid one at all. Norway's oil is in the North Sea and a small well provides multiples of tens of thousand barrels a day whereas in Alberta our conventional oil industry has many wells pumping less than one hundred barrels of oil a day. Much different economics. Of course, we now have oil sands plants that are much more productive but ..... what did I say about over taxation (Canada, not Norway) of resource producing areas that took surpluses from that Sovereign Wealth Fund?
No Ken Albertans are taxed exactly the same as other Canadians. No more, no less. Our incomes are higher, so more taxes paid. Interesting fact: in 2022, ON residents paid $73 billion in Canadian income tax (federal) Vs the $37 billion paid by QC, the $27 Billion paid by BC and the $23 billion paid by Albertans.
And please do not attempt to rewrite history:
1) Trudeau could no more have initiated a sovereign wealth fund than he did a National Energy Program.
2) With regard to building a trans Canada pipeline that is for proponents in the oil industry to propose and to fund. Really you know the oil companies built all pipelines at that time in the 1970’s and 1980’s and these Alberta based oil companies did not see a trans Canada pipeline as being as profitable as those built to transport our oil to the USA. Too, I doubt you would have had the needed public support and public consensus for such a pipeline.
I’d say take the rose coloured glasses off.
One of the things that comes through very clearly from The Coutts Diaries is that if the Pierre Trudeau government had had any clear idea what to do about stagflation, they would’ve done it. It’s not like they weren’t aware of it.
I took my first economics course in the middle of the ‘70s. I well remember the prof telling us that the traditional neo-classical approach was “if there’s too much inflation, create a little unemployment. If unemployment gets too bad, create a little inflation. But now you can’t do that.” That was the problem.
Lougheed did start a sovereign wealth fund.
Every Premier since has raided it for his/her survival.
Thanks Paul for this interview. You helped sell a copy of this book. Looking forward to reading it.
A fascinating interview. Too bad that the relevant pieces in Jim Coutts' diaries come well after the October Crisis. The National Energy Program, repatriation of the Constitution, and the Charter were, of course, all important chapters. Well before that, though, was another significant period in our country's young history, that time in 1970 which could have gone one way or another.
I get it, though. Coutts, seen then as a Pearson relic, was probably still sitting on the outside looking in at Trudeau and his inner circle. Yet, when I mentioned that period in a recent discussion with others, the shocking response from two: "Whats a FLQ?"
The same can be said about the 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing, its 40th anniversary earlier this year treated more as a footnote than as the single largest act of terrorism in Canadian history that it should be - our national ignorance extending to persons I know who later emigrated to Canada from, of all places, India.
Santayana's words, "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" looms large over Canada. Our historical knowledge gap is our Achilles Heel.
So, I will purchase a copy of Ron Graham's book to get a better understanding of probably one of the more enigmatic Prime Ministers in our country's history ("enigmatic" does not apply to his son, the self-absorbed and predictable character that he was and is).
I hope others in our country do too - many others...
I was born in 1942, so I remember those Trudeau years very well. I could never figure out why so many Canadians were enamoured of him.
I was born in 1943 and became a Landed Immigrant in 1974. My first more-or-less real job was thanks to a LIP grant, one of Trudeau's (Coutts'?) programs. (LIP = Local Initiatives Program.) So I've always had a special affection for him. As a trained economist I agree, however, that his appreciation of economic matters was lousy (and disastrous).
Living in Germany before becoming a landed immigrant in 1970, my favourite magazine was a weekly called "der Stern". Not a week went by without a story about the famous Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. Not his politics, but his weird antics and romantic escapades were on display.
Entered Canada in November 1970 during the Quebec October Crises, when the war measures act was in place, a strange time to immigrate.
I can tell I’m really old, because all this stuff feels like yesterday to me. As soon as you mentioned Trudeau‘s purging of the Pearson people and then his desperate recalling of them after the ‘72 election, I couldn’t help thinking of the way Larry Zolf characterized Trudeau’s move in his book Dance of the Dialectic: from philosopher king to Mackenzie King.
Larry Wolf was a very funny guy. Thanks for the reminder.
I just wanted to note that not a single indigo in downtown Toronto has this in stock. WTF?
Sutherland House often prints modest original runs and indigo is sometimes timid about buying them. We essentially had to convince them both that my wee Trudeau book was a bestseller. Telling your local store that you wanna buy the book would help. I'm the meantime I wonder whether Ben McNally has it
Sounds to me Trudeau senior was as incompetent and uninterested in the affair of the country as junior was and both were equally as vindictive as the other. I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. It may be a Trudeau thing, maybe a liberal thing, probably both. In any case, it shows Canadians haven't learned a thing since then.
I was a tiny dung-beetle in the corridors of power when Jim Coutts - always "Mr. Coutts" to me and my ilk - held undisputed sway over Canada's Parliament and government. (I remember sightings of Ron Graham back then, too.) I cannot wait to find out what was really happening all around me in those distant days.
I'm someone else who has bought this book after reading about it here. I'm not sure if I would have heard about it if I wasn't subscribed here.
Paul, you lament (below) that no one in Canadian journalism is doing the deep-dive Ron Graham-style book on the main political players and their entourages. Are we really going to have to wait 10 years to find out what was really going in Trudeau's last year in office or hear about Carney's path to the PMO? You're the person to do this.
Wells: "But every time an election comes around, I think: when is somebody just going to absolutely go to town on the circle of people around Pierre Poillievre, the circle of people around Justin Trudeau, the open secret that Mark Carney had people campaigning for him to become leader of the Liberal party for years before he announced himself as a candidate. Soup to nuts. The whole crazy drama of it. And it is so difficult for most working journalists to even begin to scrape together the resources to tell that story. It doesn't even occur to most people that that's a kind of story that you can tell. We've got more access to more sources of information and communication than ever before, and the whole story seems impoverished compared to what it used to be."
I worked at a magazine where, over the space of a decade, I came to understand that it was becoming my job to do what 20 journalists used to do. I'd hate to repeat that experience, except on the scale of an entire industry. When Allan Rock was justice minister, he could reasonably expect a bunch of different reporters with a bunch of different perspectives would write a dozen ambitious newspaper profiles of him in a year. I get why that number isn't as high today — I've written about it, in some detail — but I need the number to be larger than one.
No pressure, Paul. In a nation of 40+ million only a handful of people (and we can all name them) can do this type of long-form journalism-book-length profiling--as you found out with your last book. There's a market for it judging from the popularity of Canadian political reporting in substack newsletters and podcasts. I listen to the Bulwark podcast and this American political show sold-out in Toronto.
I'll buy it.
I'm weird that way.
Will we find out from the diaries how much of a fubard Dept of Defence that Pearson handed to Trudeau? Or since it was well known that PET couldn't give two hoots about the defence of Canada that it was Jim Coutts that quarterbacked the continued (and continuing?) decay of the CAF?
My local convenience store completely stopped selling magazines about 10 years ago.
It was replaced by a Slushy Machine.
I wish I was joking.
I will definitely read this........
I finished The Coutts Diaries this morning. There's an interesting aspect of the book that started to occur me about halfway through the book and was looming very large by the end.
Many reviews and articles have mentioned what they like to refer to as his "high stakes" poker games. The further I read in the the book, the more troubling the poker entries were to me. Here's a guy who is, in effect, the number 2 person in running the country (even ahead of Pitfield, at least to hear Coutts tell it) who is routinely taking part in literally all-night poker games (they often go to 8:00 am the next day, and one actually went till 11:00 am) and then picking himself up, sometimes with a hangover, takes a quick shower and goes off to meet with the PM or the cabinet and run the country.
Even more troubling, while he sometimes comes out ahead, more often he loses astonishing amounts of money. At least a couple of times, he loses $13,000 in one night. That would make most people blanch even today, but in 1979 or 1980, that would have been equivalent to well over $50,000 today, according to my trusty Canadian Inflation Calculator.
Today we would recognize this behaviour as a serious gambling addiction, or if not an addiction, at least a problem. But never once in the diaries is there any indication that anyone ever called him on it, or suggested to him that this might not be a good way for the PM's principal secretary to be conducting himself. Instead, an increasing number of party bigwigs think he should be an MP, a cabinet minister, and maybe even the next Liberal leader. And Coutts himself never suggests or intimates, or even seems to recognize, that he has a personal issue that might be disqualifying.
But the other thing that struck me as really interesting is that Coutts never once tells us, or even gives us any hint, of who is joining him in these all-night poker marathons. Were they fellow politicos? Civil servants? Just randos from the Ottawa scene? A rotating cast, or the same people over and over again? There are no hints at all. Coutts is very, very discreet about his poker partners -- even in his personal diary. Almost as if he knew they would eventually be scrutinized for publication.
I agree with a lot of this. And I think it's fair to say that self-destructive behaviour on something approximating this scale has hardly been eradicated from today's politics.
I just went back and re-read your interview with Graham and saw that you did in fact flag this, and Graham called it kind of an addiction. But once I actually read the book, it still surprised me how extreme (at least to my eyes) his poker behaviour was.
I guess we'll have to wait 40 years to get the scoop on that!
Man, I gotta read that book! I was born in 1948…
Sold!
(I also enjoyed On the Ropes. Devoured it in one sitting)