Pierre Trudeau, Statesman: October 18, 1919 – September 28, 2000

(Excerpted from Sandra Martin’s Working the Dead Beat:50 Lives that Changed Canada, which has been longlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction)

 

As enigmatic as he was complex, as combative as he was charismatic, Pierre Trudeau was the fifteenth prime minister of Canada. He championed bilingualism, multiculturalism, and national unity; he patriated our constitution and gave us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has defined modern Canada and become a model for the world.

Trudeau arrived in the House of Commons in 1965, as the junior member of the federalist trio led by Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier, whom Prime Minister Lester Pearson had recruited to bolster the Quebec wing of his caucus. A law professor and a neophyte politician who had worked briefly in the Privy Council Office more than a dozen years earlier, he was an intellectual who had studied at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and L’institut d’études politiques in Paris and then travelled the world, juxtaposing theory with the rough realities of life on the road.

In their book Trudeau Transformed, Max and Monique Nemni argue that they could have written several biographies of Trudeau, concentrating on him as an athlete, a scholar, an adventurer, a heretic, a believer, or a ladies’ man. None of these would have worked, they contend, because they would provide only slices of the man. His strength and his appeal came from the powerful and often odd contrasts among the myriad components of his char- acter and upbringing. His many private sides and personal angles — above all his belief in individual liberty, social justice, and federalism—combined in unusual and unexpected ways to make him the most memorable Canadian politician of the twentieth century.

Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal on October 18, 1919, the middle child of Grace Elliot, an anglophone of Scottish descent, and Charles-Émile Trudeau, a rural Québécois lawyer-turned-entre- preneur. Growing up, Pierre moved from one language to another like a paddle slicing through the still waters of a northern lake (what other francophone politician of his day had the linguistic ammunition to sneer, “Zap, you’re frozen,” at a stunned Robert Stanfield to deride the Opposition leader’s campaign pledge to freeze wages and prices to combat stagflation in 1974?).

His father grew rich after selling his string of automobile service stations to Imperial Oil during the Depression for the then-staggering sum of more than a million dollars, but the family always lived modestly, even after they moved to Outremont, an affluent section of Montreal. “My father taught me order and discipline,” Trudeau once said, “and my mother taught me freedom and fantasy.”

After his father died suddenly of a heart attack in the spring of 1935, when Trudeau was fifteen, he grew even closer to his mother. He also grew more introspective and took up karate and boxing, developing the pugilistic skills and the stance of the solitary warrior that he would later use to his rhetorical advantage in debates and on the campaign trail. A team player he was not.

He excelled in the role. Late in December 1967, at the end of an exuberant, self-confident centennial year, he introduced two pivotal pieces of legislation to bring the antiquated divorce laws and the stringent Criminal Code in line with the behaviours and attitudes of a younger generation of Canadians, even if the changes contravened religious codes and mores. The omnibus amendments to the Criminal Code, which proposed legalizing contraception and decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults, provided Trudeau with one of his most celebrated quotes — albeit lifted from an edito- rial in the Globe and Mail—that “the State has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Enshrining individual rights and personal freedom was one of his core beliefs and would become a hallmark of his political career and his legacy. He showcased another political and philosophical tenet—a strong federal government surmounting its constituent provinces and territories—at a televised federal-provincial conference on constitutional affairs in Ottawa in February 1968. Union Nationale leader Daniel Johnson had been elected premier of Quebec in 1966 after a campaign of “égalité ou indépendance,” and he brought that mandate and the idea of a new kind of federalism — based on the notion of two equal nations: Quebec and the rest of Canada—to the conference.

Trudeau eviscerated the argument coolly but with merciless logic, and humiliated the man on national television. “His tone ever more biting, his voice metallic, Trudeau responded to Johnson’s reference to him as the ‘député de Mont-Royal’ by describing the premier as the ‘député de Bagot’” (his provincial riding in the Eastern Townships of Quebec), as John English relates in Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. At a coffee break hastily called by Pearson to allow the tension to dissipate, Trudeau “curtly nodded at Johnson and muttered that the premier was seeking to destroy the federal government. Johnson sneered that Trudeau was acting like a candidate, not a federal minister.” Here was an early example of the lone combatant in action, yet another side of the dashing, eloquent bachelor who sported a rose in his lapel, wore a leather coat, and drove a silver Mercedes 300SL convertible.

A little more than a week later, Trudeau announced that he would be entering the leadership race to succeed Pearson as party leader and prime minister at the Liberal convention in April 1968. He had agonized over the decision to run and he didn’t win the contest easily — it took four ballots. But in the wider world, the one reached by television, he was already generating emotional crushes normally reserved for rock stars.

His appearance, his mannerisms, his eligibility, his ambiguities, and his dangerous flair lured boomers like moths to his charismatic flame. Communications theorist Don Tapscott suggested in an interview that baby boomers, who had grown up with television, looked to the box to find leaders they could follow. By that reasoning, Trudeau — “the command and control, top down, great visionary”—was the quintessential man of his time.

“We were passive recipients in a one-way, one size fits all, one-to-many medium, where the messages could be architected and controlled,” said Tapscott, identifying himself as a boomer. “It was about the powerful central authority pushing something out to passive recipients. Trudeau, with his gunslinger mode, was a great master of that.”

At times, especially in the middle of his long political career, Trudeau’s connection with Canadians attenuated into Trudeauphobia as his economic policies failed to ameliorate the recession driven by the opec oil embargo in the mid-1970s, or when the West bristled about the forced sharing of gushing oil revenues under the National Energy Program in the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, with the first sovereignty referendum defeated, the constitution patriated, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined, he seemed to lose interest in Canadians and politics, and they with him, as the deficit soared close to $40 billion and interest rates spiralled. As economist Sylvia Ostry told Maclean’s after Trudeau’s death, “He was highly intelligent and intellectual: he read all of his briefing documents, including the footnotes. He just wasn’t interested in economics. He listened to everything and understood it. But in the end, he had one priority: national unity.”

He wanted an international platform for his final crusade: a world without nuclear arms. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize but the momentum fizzled, largely because of the opposition of those dogged Cold Warriors Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Ronald Reagan of the United States. But the link with Canadians was never severed, even after he left office on June 30, 1984, moved back to Montreal with his three sons, and joined the law firm Heenan Blaikie.

Most of us who lived through those years, and even those who were too young to be startled by a Canadian prime minister pirouetting saucily behind the Queen’s back at a Buckingham Palace reception, impressed by his dignity in dealing with his flamboyantly rebellious wife, or shocked by reports of him giving the finger to protesters at a B.C. whistle stop in what came to be called the “Salmon Arm salute,” carry contrary images of Trudeau in our heads.