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on Quebecers that it had taken someone from home, from the traditionally “backward” province, to bring the rest of Canada out of the Dark Ages.
    WHEN TRUDEAU ANNOUNCED his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party on February 16, 1968—he was the last to do so, a mere month and a half before the convention, though at a point when Trudeaumania was already in full swing—he told reporters that they were to blame for his decision. They had started what they had thought was “a huge practical joke on the Liberal Party,” he said, daring the Liberals to choose someone as unconventional as himself as their leader, and had ended up being taken seriously. Given the amount of backroom strategizing that we now know preceded Trudeau’s announcement, his depicting his run as a kind of accident comes across as somewhat disingenuous. Already over the Christmas break, not two weeks after Pearson had announced his resignation and while Trudeau himself was vacationing in Tahiti and meeting the girl whowould eventually become his wife, a few choice associates back home had begun secretly organizing for his potential candidacy. Still, he might never have put himself forward if the various forces urging him on hadn’t reached a kind of crescendo in the first weeks of 1968.
    The crucial push came, again, from Marchand. He was the one from the start whom the Liberals had been thinking of as a credible successor to Pearson, to keep up the Liberal tradition of alternating English- and French-Canadian leaders. But Marchand hadn’t taken to Ottawa. His health was failing; he was known to imbibe. “It’s a crazy job,” he had told his friend André Laurendeau, co-chair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, “worse even than being a trade unionist—there at least you’ve got roots.” Unlike Trudeau, Marchand hadn’t quite been able to leave home. In particular, he didn’t “like to speak English all the time; it diminishes me by fifty per cent.”
    Early in the new year, Marchand, Trudeau, and Gérard Pelletier, who had set off together for Ottawa little more than two years earlier, met in Montreal at the Café Martin. “The Three Wise Men,” they had been dubbed in English Canada at the time, though in Quebec, somewhat less charitably, they were known as Les trois colombes, “The Three Doves.” Marchand had remained their front man and strategist, though now, over dinner, he told the others that he would not run for the Liberal leadership. Trudeau had surely suspected this change of heart by then. Six months earlier Marchand had even taken the line that the francophones shouldn’t run any candidate at all, since the current nationalist climate in Quebec would inevitably cast any francophone leader as a mere apologist for the English. But Trudeau must also have suspected that it had surely crossed Marchand’s mind more than once to put Trudeau himself forward as a candidate, particularly in the weeks since his Criminal Code bill, given the frequency with which that suggestion had been cropping up in the national media.
    According to Pelletier, however, Trudeau was “stunned” when Marchand presented exactly this option. Whether he was actually stunned or only strategically so we will never know: by this point, when people were already working behind the scenes to set up a campaign office for him, Trudeau had entered into the kind of cat-and-mouse game he was so good at, growing more deferential and coy the more people insisted. The historical consensus, in any event, is that Trudeau would surely never have run if Marchand had chosen to, and his seeming shock at Marchand’s proposal may have been simply the realization that his candidacy was no longer just a kind of intellectual game but a realpossibility. In later life, Trudeau admitted that he had often appeared most cavalier about the things he’d been most afraid of failing at, and this may have been one of those moments, never seen publicly,