a serious contender for the position of secretary general of the United Nations. The fact that an intensely private, left-leaning law professor was able to attain the office of prime minister of Canada and hold on (with one hiatus) from 1968 to 1984, the year he opted to resign from public life, is perhaps accomplishment enough.
Trudeau’s final year in office was played out on the international stage in terms of his well-meaning but hastily conceived world peace initiative. To many observers it appeared that Trudeau was less interested in advocating his peculiar peace plan than he was in promoting himself as a candidate for the highest office of the United Nation — secretary general. How seriously Trudeau sought this office is an open question, but it is generally admitted by U.N. observers that Trudeau was not a serious contender for the position, being distrusted by both the communists and the capitalists. He was also regarded as something of a loose cannon and a social gadfly by the representatives of the unaligned countries. Kurt Waldheim was succeeded as secretary general by Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru. It is likely, one would imagine, that Trudeau would have had greater impact on the world stage as secretary general than did the lack-lustre Perez de Cueller.
016. What did Lester B. Pearson not say was his greatest disappointment?
Many honours came the way of Lester B. Pearson, including becoming prime minister of Canada between 1963 and 1968. It is an open secret that Pearson, the career diplomat, wanted to be elected to the highest office of the United Nations — secretary general — not to the prime ministership of Canada.
He was a serious candidate for that office on two occasions. In 1946 he was defeated by Trygve Lie of Norway, and in 1953 by Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden. Pearson’s sympathies were too pro-American for the Soviets, who much preferred neutralist Scandinavians. Yet, between 1952 and 1956, Pearson served with distinction as president of the United Nations General Assembly, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts in defusing the Suez Crisis.
It was something of an anti-climax for him to contest the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada, to endure the taunts of Prime Minister and then opposition leader John Diefenbaker, and for him to head Canada during its centennial year. Canada was not the United Nations; Canadian affairs were not world affairs.
017. Who wrote the score for the musical Duddy Kravitz?
Mordecai Richler’s novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was the basis of both a successful feature film and an unsuccessful musical comedy. The music for Duddy was written by Galt McDermot, co-creator of the fabulously successful Broadway musical Hair. By all reports, McDermot, who was born in Montreal, composed a lively score for Duddy. The production opened at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, where it bombed. It reopened at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, in May 1984, where it bombed again. It has not been heard from since, but given the prominence of the author and the composer, it is not likely to lie fallow forever.
018. Who took the photograph that appears on the cover of Rush’s 1984 album?
The rock band Rush posed for the camera of famous portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa, and the image was reproduced for the cover of their 1984 album Rush.
019. What success story was told in the CBC-TV movie Breaking All the Rules?
Breaking All the Rules, which premiered on CBC-TV in 1987, told the story of the invention and marketing of the Trivial Pursuit board game. The game’s originators are two Canadians: John Haney and Scott Abbott. The game was conceived in 1981 at the Jester Arms Inn at Stratford, Ontario After a rocky year and a half, the concept caught on, and before long everyone, it seemed, was playing Trivial Pursuit.
020. Which painter did Oscar Wilde praise as “the Canadian Constable”?
The Anglo-Irish writer Oscar Wilde toured Central and Eastern Canada in 1882. At an exhibit of art in Toronto in May, he saw a painting called Fleeting Shadows. The pastoral landscape of Waterloo County impressed him as a work with “soul” and “feeling.” Wilde felt the artist to be “an exceedingly clever fellow” and proclaimed him “the Canadian Constable.” In an address later that evening at the Grand Opera House, Wilde praised the painting for being “full of the highest art and beauty.”
Fleeting Shadows was painted by a young artist named Homer Watson (1855–1936), who was a native of Doon, Ontario, and a self-taught artist with no social connections. His career was given a great assist by Wilde, who commissioned a landscape painting of his own and helped secure additional commissions from friends in the United States. When the painter made his first trip to England in 1888, Wilde introduced Watson to Whistler with these words: “Mr. Watson is the Canadian Constable, and Barbizon without ever having seen Barbizon.” These details are noted by Kevin O’Brien in Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (1982).
021. Who was the only French Canadian ever to meet Victor Hugo?
Today, it is difficult to imagine the degree to which Victor Hugo (1802–1885) dominated the cultural life of France and French-speakers throughout the world in the second half of the ninteenth century. The only English writer to be compared with the great literary Frenchman is Charles Dickens. Yet, the English novelist was less versatile than the French littérateur. Hugo, after all, was not only a novelist, but also a leading poet and dramatist — and Dickens lived only fifty-eight years to Hugo’s eighty-three.
Victor Hugo’s life and work mightily impressed Louis-Honoré Fréchette (1839–1908). The Quebec poet and littérateur was accorded recognition as the unofficial poet laureate of French Canada and was the first Canadian to be honoured by the illustrious Academie Française. Fréchette initiated a correspondence with the Hugo. In an address delivered before the Royal Society of Canada in 1890, Fréchette recalled how ten years earlier he had been received by the great French writer, then in resident of the isle of Guernsey. Fréchette greeted Hugo as one “saluted by the entire universe.” Hugo replied that Fréchette was a victim of “the follies of Louis XV” during whose reign France lost Quebec.
It was Fréchette’s suggestion that he was probably the sole French Canadian ever to meet Hugo — or at least to be received by him.
022. Which American president is remembered in Quebec as le petit juge?
The American president William Howard Taft (1857–1930) served from 1909 to 1913 as the twenty-seventh president of the United States. Thereafter, he served as chief of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1921 until his death. Taft had an association with French Canada that is recalled to this day. For the last thirty-eight years of his life, Taft summered at the family lodge at Murray Bay, the resort community on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, known today as La Malbaie. The French Canadians were fond of le petit juge — the little judge — for Taft was short of stature but outgoing and friendly in nature. In fact, it is Taft who as president established the “special relationship” that was said to have existed between Canada and the United States until the Trudeau administration in 1968.
023. Was Benjamin Franklin’s son a traitor?
Benjamin Franklin’s son is judged a traitor to the cause of American independence, but not to the British and Canadian cause of the Imperial connection.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. His son, William Franklin, served as governor of New Jersey. Identified with the British during the Revolutionary War, he was arrested as a spy, jailed for two years, and deported to England. In England he enjoyed the perquisites of a lifetime pension.
Interestingly, William’s son, William Temple Franklin, was an American patriot and stuck with his grandfather.
024. What is Canadian about “The One Who Got Away”?
