Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice by Christo Aivalis (review)

In academic circles, the argument that Pierre Trudeau was firmly and consistently committed to liberal democracy, rather than socialist democracy, will not constitute an especially controversial thesis. However, Christo Aivalis' book, The Constant Liberal: Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour and the Canadian Social Democratic Left, serves a much deeper purpose than what its title might otherwise suggest. Aivalis' meticulously researched work helps students of Canadian politics, history, and labour studies, to better understand why Trudeau ultimately chose liberalism over socialism after decades as an ally and fellow traveller of the Left in Quebec. The author's highly readable narrative - spanning five decades - focuses on a series of key policy areas and ultimately delivers a thought-provoking social democratic analysis of the politics of Pierre Trudeau. In fact, the book reveals as much about the ideology and politics of the social democratic left as it does about Trudeau. Aivalis' work is a welcome addition to the growing bodies of literature on Trudeau and social democracy in Canada, respectively.

Despite sustained engagement with labour unions and the ccp-ndp throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Trudeau first ran for office, and won, as a Liberal in 1965. He went on to become prime minister in 1968 and had a significant impact of Canadian politics, from the imposition of wage and price controls to patriation of the Constitution with a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Throughout it all, Aivalis contends that Trudeau did not undergo an ideological transformation, despite the oft heard critique that Trudeau lost his left-wing ideals as a Liberal in government. Rather, according to Aivalis, Trudeau was a constant Liberal who, while welcoming of many social democratic ideas, ultimately embraced liberalism because he saw it as a more inclusive, catch-all, political project that could subsume the best parts of left-wing thinking.

In order to make sense of this decision, Aivalis sets out to explore Trudeau's ideological roots and argues that while democratic socialists like Harold Laski, Eugene Forsey, and F.R. Scott influenced his thinking, Trudeau's own thinking was consistently focused on the defence and promotion of narrow democratic and political rights rather than a class-based approaches to rights, freedoms, or politics more generally.

Focusing on Trudeau's complex relationship with the labour movement, Aivalis' analysis helps readers understand how Trudeau's central role in labour education and legal support for unions in Québec in the 1950s and 1960s was as much, if not more, about building a bulwark against Premier Maurice Duplessis' repressive and undemocratic Union Nationale regime, than it was about helping workers' struggles. In other words, his support for striking workers and unions (most famously in the Asbestos strike of 1949) was not class-based, but rather driven by his desire to build a coalition capable of defeating the Union Nationale and pushing Québec towards embracing a more liberal democratic form of politics.

According to Aivalis, Trudeau's quest to build a broad coalition of forces in opposition to government repression is what ultimately led him to join the Liberal Party rather than the ndp. Despite close ties to many important figures in the ccp-ndp in Quebec, and despite repeated overtures and attempts to recruit Trudeau as a candidate, he instead opted to run for the Liberal Party. While sympathetic to many ndp policy positions, Trudeau saw the ccp-ndp as alien to, and thus unelectable in, Quebec. Moreover, he was repelled by what he saw as a desperate and misguided attempt by the party to appeal to growing nationalist sentiment in Quebec by adopting a "Two Nations" approach to Canada. Trudeau also reasoned that the ndp's emphasis on class-based politics would cut off a rather large constituency of voters who did not identify with such an approach.

Trudeau easily won his seat in the 1965 election and in 1968 captured the leadership of the Liberal Party to become Canada's fifteenth prime minister. Once in power...