Toasts of the President and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada

Note: The President proposed the toast at 9:58 p.m. in the State Dining Room at the White House at a dinner in honor of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada.

See also Items 124 and 127.

Prime Minister Trudeau responded as follows:

Mr. President and Mrs. Nixon, distinguished guests:

You do me great honor, Mr. President, in drinking my health. And the kind words you have spoken about me are all the more welcome and moving that they come not only from the head of the country which is Canada's best friend and ally, but they come from a man who has shown through his years in politics, 22, you said, Mr. President--that is about six times longer than myself, but then your country is ten times greater so it probably works out-a man who has shown that he could occupy many of the elective offices of his land and who now holds the highest elective office in his country, your country, the greatest, the most powerful on earth, a man who has served his country well with devotion, with knowledge, with wisdom, with fortitude, with courage, a man who has been persistent, a man who has been sincere and faithful.

For these reasons, sir, I thank you for your welcome. And I want to say that being one of Gallic descent, I have particular affinity for things American as I think the Americans have for things French and Gallic.

There is a saying, I know, in your land that every good American when he dies goes to Paris. I would suggest, Mr. President, that many of your fellow countrymen have not waited until they die nor until they be good to find Paris.

But I would be remiss in my duty if I didn't suggest that there is a very easy and pleasant alternative much closer at hand, Montreal, which welcomes all Americans and which would welcome you, Mr. President.

I hope you will be visiting our country as soon as your office permits. I can assure you you will be very welcome there. I can't guarantee that there will be no trouble. I can't guarantee it for myself. But as one new politician to a more mature one, I can tell you that we will take our chances together. And I think that the Canadian people will show you how much they respect and admire the President of the United States of America.

Every year many Americans come to Canada and the same number, more or less, of Canadians come to the United States--70 million border crossings last year, Mr. President.

We all come to the United States in pursuit of happiness of one kind or another. When I was a student and a younger man I pursued a different kind of happiness.

We come here, though, also to seek knowledge, to learn from your greater technology, from your great advances in science, from your great universities; we learn also from the hospitality of your people and from the great ideals and institutions that the leaders of your country have set up as models for humanity over the years.

We learn these things and we respect you for that. As one man who is a former Harvard graduate and coming to Washington at the beginning of a new administration, I can promise that I will stay less long than some others.

But I will say that many of the things that I learned in one of your great schools was about this fine sense of balance that the Americans had shown in their ideals and in their institutions and how from the very early days they tackled and solved this problem of eternal conflict between liberty and the rule of law, between the need for authority and the need for individual freedoms, how they tackled the problem of the individual wanting to be alone and yet needing society, and how over the decades and over the years your country has been able to adapt and meet these changes.

And I think all foreign students of your country come to admire most this great vitality, this toughness, this resilience of your great society and how rather than be too influenced by its mother country-of course you had a rather violent parting with your mother country, Mr. President. But we are perhaps in Canada a little bit too inclined to borrow from England and borrow from France. But you went out on your own and you invented this great institution of modern federalism, and you found this balance in your institutions between freedom and order.

That is why today when we see the mighty upheavals in your society we know you will meet them. We know you will find solutions and because you are so far ahead of other industrial societies we know that we will be able to learn from the lessons that you will give other nations who are trying to acquire this great industrial status.

We will learn from your errors. We will learn from your successes. And we know we will always have a helping hand in the United States.

There have been for so many years now', Mr. President, no tensions between our countries. It was your first President, George Washington, in his farewell address, who said that passionate relationships between one country and another engendered a host of evils.

Well, for a long time there have been no passionate relationships between our countries. There have been relationships based on discussion, on reason, on, as you put it this morning, sir, in welcoming me, the excitement of diversity. But always we have solved these through discussion, through reasonable men getting together and sometimes reasonable women getting together asking ourselves about our problem and seeking the best solution for everyone concerned.

And we know this will be the way of the future. I have learned in our discussions this morning, Mr. President, and this afternoon. I have seen how this will still be the pattern of relationship between our countries, a pattern based on wisdom rather than passion, a pattern based on a desire to understand rather than to dominate.

It was a Frenchman, de Tocqueville, who first described I think in a very able way the kind of delicate balance that the United States ideals and institutions were able to put forward. And he had a phrase, si vous me permettez de traduire un peu librement, which went about like this: That you don't receive truth from your enemies and your friends are rarely willing to offer it. "It is for this reason," he said, "that I have written these books."

Well, Mr. President, we are the kind of friends who do tell the truth to each other. We have told it this morning. I am sure we will tell it in the future.

We find that this kind of relationship is the only basis on which nations of the world can live in peace together--in understanding.

I want to say also how grateful I am to you, Mrs. Nixon, for your very gracious hospitality, for the wonderful food, the lovely flowers, and the exciting music. I feel almost as though I am among old friends. I hope we will become such.

But I do want to, in thanking you, ask the ladies and gentlemen assembled to drink your continued good health, sir, to drink the health of not only Canada's closest neighbor, the head of state which is Canada's closest neighbor, our longstanding ally, but also the health of a friend, President Nixon of the United States.