Soundbite Histories – Part II (the Mea Culpa)

Daniel R. Meister

In the first part of an article I published with Active History in February 2024, I contested the authenticity of a quote frequently attributed to Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The quote in question: “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want” with regard to First Nations in Canada. However, while in search of a different quote recently, I accidentally stumbled upon proof of its existence. This article is intended to correct the record and provides the context in which the original quote appeared, as well as the sourcing.

On 24 February 1970, Trudeau traveled to Carleton University to appear on the campus confrontation television show “Under Attack.” The first questions were posed by the moderator, television personality Fred Davis, before a panel of students took over. During his answer to Davis’s final question, about the recent White Paper on Taxation, Trudeau discussed how he preferred to introduce white papers instead of legislative bills, in order to allow for more discussion – “some people call it participation” – even by those opposed. Davis, in turn, remarked that such as approach also gave opposition parties an issue to work with. To this, Trudeau responded:

Well, they have had other issues before. We have other white papers. We had the policy paper on Indian policy which was an issue I suppose. This is another thing which had been demanded of us at election time. You know: ‘When are you going to do something about the Indian; when are you going to make him equal to the white man; what are you going to do about these laws that put him in a ghetto or on a reservation or something?’ So, we have come up with a policy paper.^[1]

Although two White Papers were mentioned in the introductory segment, most of the questions that followed concerned the economy, including some related questions about the sale of arms to the United States in the context of the war in Vietnam. It was only at the end of the program that a question was posed about the other white paper:

Q.             Mr. Trudeau, I would like to ask you about your Indian policy. Why do you insist on integrating the Indian into Canadian society when he doesn’t want to be integrated? Even you, yourself, have suggested that we live in an unjust society, there’s poverty, pollution, slums. Why do you want to make them like that?

A.             We’re not really forcing them to integrate. We’re not forcing anyone do anything. That is why we published a policy paper, you could call it a white paper on Indians. What we did, and if you read it, you’ll see that this is fair, it is a very short paper, what we say essentially is this: Canada is at a crossroads; the Canadian Indian has to choose and the white Canadian has to choose too. For a hundred years and more, they have not been integrated; they have been living apart, they have been under special laws, they didn’t come under provincial jurisdiction, they came under special treatment by a special department of the federal government. They lived on reserves; they didn’t have the right to sell their land; they were not equals in our society. And what we are saying essentially is this: if you want to remain this way, fine; if you want to stay in reserves, if you want to not integrate — to use your word — if you want to remain apart as a race within Canada, as a nation within a nation, we won’t force you. But we are telling you[,] you have to make the choice now. And we’re telling you that the way we see the history of Canada and of the western nations developing, no small group of people can long remain outside of the mainstream of education, technology, urban living, and all these things (some of which have produced pretty awful results, I agree). You cannot do this without paying a very heavy penalty in terms of the health of children, the education of minds, the freedom to move, the right to accumulate property and the right to be treated as an equal under the law. We are just saying to the Indians, you’ve got a choice now and we’re putting this position to you, we’re telling you – and I think it was the feeling of the Canadian people in general until we came forth with this policy paper. I remember this very type of audience during an election campaign saying, when are we going to do away with this special treatment for Indians, when are we going to make them one of us, equal to us so they have a right to integrate into our society? Well, we said, here’s a policy which would permit you to do it. It’s going to be tough and it’s going to take long, but we’ll help you if you want. And it will only work if the white people in Canada, the other people, agree to help you do this. But if you people don’t want—those of you who are not Indians—if you don’t want it to happen and if the Indian people don’t want it to happen, it won’t happen. The Indians will continue living on land which is held in trust by the federal government; they’ll continue coming under the jurisdiction of a particular department; they won’t be equal citizens to the other citizens. And this is the choice and we’re not forcing it on anybody. But before rejecting it, you should ask yourselves about the alternatives. There is a lot of emotionalism in this too. It’s easy to reject the defects in our society and say they will come in with us and they will be poor and so on. But they’re poor now.

Q.             They are afraid though that integration will lead to assimilation – cultural genocide they call it. Do you agree with that?

A.             Well, there are two ways of disappearing. One is to lock yourself up in a ghetto behind walls and sort of stand fast, protected by these walls of the law or of your ghetto or of your reservation, and if you do this you risk some chance that the caravan of humanity will not attack you in your fortress but they will walk on to the plains of time and they will be on somewhere in the future …

There are many minorities in Canada which have chosen to integrate into our society. It doesn’t mean they lost all their values; it doesn’t mean that they can’t preserve a certain number of things. But they have a choice. In a sense, to a very different degree, this is the choice we have in Quebec and this is why I am for integration into the Canadian federation — because there is a way of separating Quebec and of saying we will be more protected if we don’t have to work with others and if we exist entre nous and if you leave us alone. It’s a view which is an acceptable view, but it’s not mine. And I don’t think that it is the long-run view and the enlightened view of the Indians and the white people in Canada. But if this is what they want, it’s fine. We will keep the Indians in ghettos as long as they want.^[2]

At the time, the quote “keep the Indians in ghettos” went largely unremarked upon, as did a subsequent question about reports that Indigenous farmers in northern Saskatchewan were starving and Trudeau’s subsequent denial. Instead, most of the press reception of the event was positive, even fawning, in part because of anticipated hostility from the gathered students. The Toronto Star’s TV critic Pat Scott called it “A virtuoso performance … His choice of Under Attack as a podium was a calculated risk … But … Trudeau made it the most effective single podium he has found on television.” Indeed, only one news article made mention of Trudeau’s discussion of the White Paper. Robert Hull, writing in the Windsor Star, reported: “[Trudeau] denied Indians were being forced to integrate into society, but said they were merely being given the freedom to do so if they wished, adding that the proposals in the white paper were not yet law and wouldn’t be if the whites and the Indians didn’t want integration.”^[3]

The soundbite that did emerge from the interview related to Trudeau’s abandonment of the idea of the Just Society. As he put it, “I don’t just the term any more because it has become a kind of slogan and I don’t like slogans.”^[4] The later soundbite, “keep the Indians in the ghetto as long as they want,” while consistently mischaracterized, points to just one of the ways that the Just Society failed to materialize for all peoples. But the reason that the quotation was little discussed at the time is due to the fact that Trudeau’s full answer was not aired: in the transcript of the interview, between the final two paragraphs of the quote above, a line reads: “…(Station break, end of taped TV program)…” 

The context matters – what did he mean by it? As his answers reveal, Trudeau strongly believed that both Quebec and Indigenous peoples’ problems were the result of their failure to being fully integrated into – and feel at home in – the Canadian nation. This belief stemmed from his small-l liberal political philosophy, with its conception of equality as sameness. That is, discrimination could be “positive” or “negative”: negative discrimination involved the withholding of rights, for example, while positive discrimination consisted of any different or special treatment. For Trudeau, the path to equality lay through the elimination of all “special treatment” for Indigenous peoples, which is what the White Paper had proposed: no more status, no more Treaty Rights, nothing.  

The remark was therefore not the threat it has been made out to be. Rather, it was a flippant – even arrogant – expression of this belief and of frustration that Indigenous leaders did not share it. He sincerely, though wrongly, believed that his attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples was actually the only path to helping them, to “rescuing” them from the “ghetto,” as pesky voters demanded. But since his approach, expressed in the White Paper, had been refused, he would “keep them in the ghetto” through inaction, through not enacting additional assimilatory measures.

I previously concluded that Trudeau’s position on “Aboriginal Rights” was complex and evolved over time, and I argued that this history cannot be captured in a single quote. This remains true. But that particular quote is accurate, and as my colleague Meredith Batt has recently and bravely written, it is important for historians to admit when we get it wrong and to correct the record. They were right. Mea culpa. 

Daniel R. Meister is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University who is researching the history of Canada’s policy of multiculturalism. He is a Regular Contributor to Active History.

^[1] “Transcript of Question and Answer Period for Programme ‘Under Attack’ Recorded at Carleton University, Ottawa, 24 February 1970,” p. 9, file “Speeches/Discours – 24 February 1970 – ‘Under Attack’ – Ottawa, Ont. 1970,” Vol. 42, MG26 013, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

^[2] “Transcript of Question and Answer Period,” 24–26. This excerpt can also be found in Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Conversations with Canadians [ed. Ivan Head] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, [1972]), 13–15, which is where I first found the quote.

^[3] Robert Hull, “‘Just Society’ Label Buried by PM,” Windsor Star (25 February 1970), 33.

^[4] See Canadian Press, “‘Just Society’ Just a Slogan,” which ran in numerous sources, including the Toronto Star (25 February 1970), 1; see also Robert Hull, “‘Just Society’ Label Buried by PM,” Windsor Star (25 February 1970), 33. The PMO must have deemed more significant his remarks on sharing natural resources with the USA, as this was the portion of the speech that was excerpted. See “Excerpt – Prime Minister on ‘Under Attack,’ February 24, 1970,” file “Interviews/Entrevous – 24 February 1970 – ‘Under Attack’,” Vol. 13, MG26 O13, LAC.